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Telegraph A predatory monster lobster that lived in the sea more than 500 million years ago has been identified from pieces of a fossil jigsaw. Hurdia Victoria was about half a metre long and prowled the waters with a circular jaw filled with teeth and a pair of spiny claws. The creature is related to Anomalocaris, a vicious prehistoric fish whose relatively large size and toothy mouth earned it the nickname "the T. rex of the Cambrian". Researchers found the fossil fragments of Hurdia almost 100 years ago but assumed it was just an ancient lobster. Now a new assessment of the Canadian fossils has given a clearer picture of the creature which would have terrorised the deep. But scientists are still baffled by a strange, seemingly pointless shell structure on top of the lobster's head. {mosgoogle left 7887083644} Researcher Allison Daley, from Uppsala University in Sweden, who has been studying the fossils for three years as part of her doctoral thesis, said: "This structure is unlike anything seen in other fossil or living arthropods. "The use of the large carapace extending from the front of its head is a mystery. In many animals, a shell or carapace is used to protect the soft parts of the body, as you would see in a crab or lobster, but this structure in Hurdia is empty and does not cover or protect the rest of the body. We can only guess at what its function might have been." Dr Greg Edgecombe, from the Natural History Museum in London, who has studied the best preserved Hurdia specimen, said: "The way the fossil is preserved made us decide that it really had this structure in front of its head, but we still don't know what it was for." Both Hurdia and Anomalocaris are early offshoots of the evolutionary lineage that led to insects, crustaceans, spiders, millipedes and centipedes.
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