Editor's Summary

17 April 2008

A fancy eater

Modern crustaceans show a wide diversity of feeding strategies, evidenced by the complex array of mouthparts and appendages required to handle food of different sizes and types. Back in the Cambrian Period, however, things were much simpler — or so it was thought.Now, a Cambrian crustacean capable of selective, efficient shrimp-like feeding among the otherwise messy-feeding and archaic-looking Cambrian arthropods has been described. This relatively large creature could manipulate fine food particles more than 100 million years before the major expansions of large-bodied particle-handling crustaceans, emphasizing the role of ecological context in driving adaptive radiations.

Letter: Sophisticated particle-feeding in a large Early Cambrian crustacean

Thomas H. P. Harvey & Nicholas J. Butterfield

doi:10.1038/nature06724

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