Phylogeny and life habits of Early Arthropods-Predation in the Early Cambrian Sea

Phylogeny and life habits of Early Arthropods-Predation in the Early Cambrian Sea

Andreas

MAAS;Dieter

WALOSZEK;CHEN

Junyuan;Andreas

BRAUN;WANG

Xiuqiang;HUANG Diying

【期刊名称】《自然科学进展（英文版）》 【年(卷),期】2004(014)002

【摘要】We investigated two new arthropods from the Maotianshan-Shale fauna of southern China in the course of our research on life strategies, particularly predation, in Early Cambrian marine macrofaunal biota. One form clearly belongs to the so-called \arthropods, animals that were, most likely, active predators catching prey with their first pair of large, specialized frontoventral appendages. Based on this, we hypothesize that the new species and many others, if not all, of the \arthropods were derivatives of the chelicerate stem lineage and not forms having branched off at different nodes along the evolutionary lineage of the Arthropoda. Rather, we consider the \arthropods as belonging to a monophyletic clade, which modified autapomorphically their first pair of appendages (antennae in general arthropod terminology) into raptorial organs for food capture. The second new form resembles another Maotianshan-Shale arthropod, Fuxianhuia protensa, in sharing a head made of only two separate segments, a small segment bearing oval