Cambrian predator had killer eyes View to a kill A fearsome
predator that swam in the Cambrian oceans was in fact a metre-
long arthropod with killer vision, say researchers.
Palaeontologist Dr John Paterson, from the University of New
England, and colleagues, have discovered the fossilised remains
of compound eyes from a creature called anomalocaris. "The fact
that each eye in anomalocaris would have had over 16,000 lenses,
means it would have very, very good resolution," says Paterson,
whose work is published today in the journal Nature. "When you
consider that a modern housefly, for example, has about 3000
lenses, it's pretty impressive that an animal half a billion
years old already has remarkable vision like this." Around 500
million years ago, during the Cambrian, large alien-like
creatures began to resemble modern animals, says Paterson. "But
you still had the odd freak swimming around," he says, referring
to the metre-long free-swimming anomalocaris. "It's an animal
that's on its way to becoming an art