Schinderhannes

Schinderhannes bartelsi is a newly discovered species of anomalocarid known from one specimen from the Lower Devonian Hunsrück Slates. Its discovery was shocking because previously, anomalocaridids had only been known from exceptionally preserved fossil beds from the Cambrian, 100 million years previous.

Morphology
Schinderhannes is about 10 cm long; like other anomalocaridids, it bears a pair of great appendages, a radial Peytoia mouth, and large, stalked, compound eyes. It has 12 body segments; large flap-like structures used for swimming protrude from the 11th segment, and from just behind the head.

Ecology
Its gut is preserved in a fashion typical of predators', and this lifestyle is supported by the raptorial nature of the spiny great appendages, and the size of the eyes. The organism clearly swum, propelling itself with the 'flippers' attached to its head, and using its wing-like lobes on the 11th segment to steer. These lobes presumably derived from the lateral lobes of Cambrian anomalocaridids; these ancestors used lobes along their sides to swim, and lacked the specialisations of Schinderhannes.

Significance
The organisms allows the classifictaion of early arthropods to be resolved, to some degree. The organism is classified basally to the true arthropods, but is closer to that group than Anomalocaris. This suggests that the anomalocaridid group is in fact paraphyletic - that is, that the arthropods are descended from anomalocaridids.[1] The fossil has other implications - it shows that the group of early arthropods with short 'great appendages' are not a natural grouping.

The organism's discovery was most significant because of the huge range extension of the anomalocaridids it caused: the group was only previously known from lagerstatte of the lower-to-middle Cambrian, 100 million years before. This underlined the utility of lagerstatte like the Hunsrück slate: these exceptionally preserved fossil horizons may be the only opportunity we get to observe non-mineralised forms.