First Super Predator Was a Hawk-Eyed Shrimp

The world’s first apex predator, a beast called Anomalocaris, was no shrimp. Well, it sort of was, but not to the tiny critters that inhabited the planet’s oceans 500 million years ago. Giant eyes with thousands of lenses and extraordinary vision made the marine monster all the more formidable, according to a new study.

Some 500 million years ago, a giant shrimp-like creature prowled the earth’s oceans, then home to every living animal on the planet. Thought to have been the world’s first apex predator, at 3 feet long Anomalocaris dwarfed its contemporaries—the tiny trilobites, jellyfish and early vertebrates of the Cambrian Era. As if its razor-edged teeth and powerful claws weren’t fearsome enough, scientists have now discovered that the marine monster boasted some of the sharpest—and, in proportion to its size, largest—eyes in history.


Scientists already suspected that Anomalocaris, just like today’s flies and horseshoe crabs, possessed compound eyes, which feature multiple lenses and excel at detecting movement. In the December 8 issue of Nature, an international team reports that Anomalocaris fossils found in South Australia confirm the theory and suggest that the Cambrian predator had highly acute vision—and might have seen even better than most living compound eyed-creatures. Each eye measured up to 3 centimeters in length and contained more than 16,000 lenses, according to the researchers, led by experts from the South Australian Museum, the University of Adelaide and other institutions.

Source: History.com