Unveiling the Alien Taco Fish: The Fascinating Discovery of Odaraia’s Ancestry and Evolution

BERLIN – Expert we managed to solve the mystery of one of the strangest sea creatures ever discovered, a fish nicknamed the ‘alien taco fish’.
As reported by Metro, the fish with the scientific name Odaraia is a rather strange creature with big eyes, a taco-like shell, and a tail that looks like a submarine’s rudder.

However, a new study found two jaws in Odaraia fossils that make it one of the earliest ancestors of most animal species on Earth today.

After 500 million years since these creatures crossed our oceans, the evolutionary biologist Alejandro Izquierdo-López led a study that discovered the strange biology of Odaraia.

Alejandro, from the University of Toronto, explains: “Odaraia are arthropods, animals not very different from crabs or shrimps,”

“This creature had a pair of large eyes, a pair of “jaws” in its mouth, and a long body with nearly 30 pairs of legs. The tail looks exactly like a submarine’s rudder, or a shark’s tail.”

“Half of its body is enclosed in a shield or carapace, which is shaped like a tube, or “taco” as we nicknamed it,”

The classification of Odaraia has been ‘confusing’ to scientists, according to the Royal Ontario Museum, but thanks to paleontologists studying its fossils and discovering the mole, the creature can be identified officially a mandible.

Around 150 fossils, collected between 1975 and 2000, were analyzed for the research that led to this breakthrough.

Odaraia was first discovered in the 1910s in the Burgess Shale, a fossil site in British Columbia, Canada.

Alejandro and his co-author, paleontologist Jean-Bernard Caron, published their study in the journal Proceedings B.

(wbs)