Anomalocaris was the earliest known apex predator, living during the Cambrian Period. It had a large head, two eyes on stalks, and two hooked feeding arms. It used its huge eyes to tear apart small animals and was an extreme predator due to its adaptations and size.
An apex predator is a predator at the top of the food chain. An apex predator has no other predators, except perhaps other members of its own species. Apex predators have been around for a long time, but not forever. Although there is some summary evidence of limited predation during the Ediacaran Period, about 570 million years ago, modern predation did not begin until the Cambrian Period, about 542 million years ago. During this time, the animals developed hard shells and other signs of defense against predation. Evident predators begin to appear in the fossil record.
The earliest known apex predator was the strange invertebrate Anomalocaris (meaning “abnormal crayfish”). For the time it lived, when most organisms were no more than a few inches long, Anomalocaris was enormous, measuring up to one meter (3.3 feet). Anomalocaris had a large head, with two eyes on the stalks, and two hooked feeding “arms” in front of the mouth that were 7 inches long when fully extended. Its mouth, one of the strangest in nature, consisted of 32 stacked plates arranged in a circle, which in appearance resembled a slice of pineapple. These plates were tipped with hooked teeth and extended into the esophagus.
Anomalocaris had a cuttlefish-like mode of locomotion: it had two flexible lobes on either side of its body, which it swayed to move or hover in place. This apex predator had a large lobster-like, fan-shaped tail. The fossil was initially very difficult to identify as three parts of Anomalocaris were discovered separately and all thought to be associated with different organisms until a complete cast of the body was found.
At the time, most prey was fixed to or roaming about the seabed, although several cnidarians (relatives of jellyfish) and small trilobites swam on the seabed. Anomalocaris would have used its huge eyes, among the earliest in the fossil record, to tear apart various small animals and shove them into its cavernous mouth. Anomalocaris is thought to be an apex predator due to various adaptations indicating its extreme specialization as a predator and its relatively large size. It would have consumed other smaller predators, such as its anomalocarid companions and close relatives such as Opabinia.
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