Yicaris
| Yicaris | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||
| Lower Cambrian | ||||||||||
| approx. 520 million years | ||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||
|
||||||||||
| Scientific name | ||||||||||
| Yicaris | ||||||||||
| Zhang , Siveter , Waloszek & Maas , 2007 | ||||||||||
| Art | ||||||||||
|
Yicaris is the oldest known representative of the "modern" crustaceans ( Eucrustacea ). The fossil identifiedby researchers from Ulm University in collaboration with Yunnan University and Leicester University in 2007lived around 520 million years ago, in the Lower Cambrian , in the area of today's Chinese province of Yunnan on the edge of a sea. The animal was probably only a few millimeters tall.
While other, extinct groups of crustaceans from the Lower Cambrian were already known, representatives of the Eucrustacea, to which all crustaceans living today with the exception of Remipedia belong, had previously been found at the earliest in layers of the Upper Central to Upper Cambrian. The researchers justify the assignment to the Eucrustacea with the extremities provided with epipodites , in which they found similarities with the Cephalocarida , Branchiopoda and Copepoda . Some researchers also see epipodites as the precursors of insect wings .
The scientific name is derived from the Chinese Yi people who live in the area; dianensis refers to Dian ( 滇 , Diān ), a former kingdom in the area of the Chinese province of Yunnan , where the material was found.
literature
- Xi-guang Zhang, David J. Siveter, Dieter Waloszek & Andreas Maas: An epipodite-bearing crown-group crustacean from the Lower Cambrian , Nature 449, October 4, 2007, pp. 595-598 doi : 10.1038 / nature06138