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Then there was another mystery, not as common as the headless shrimp, but one that looked like a sort of jellyfish, with radiating lines out, and this strange hole in the middle. And about twenty years ago, it was discovered that actually, there is a link between this and this. This bit is not a separate shrimp, it's actually a claw. And this bit is not a jellyfish, it's a mouth. And in the mouth you can see something that looks very significant. Could these be teeth? And were these not legs but spikes, used to stab and grab prey? The two were, in fact, connected. But now we have a most perfect fossil, which really demonstrates that that is indeed the case. This, you might say, is the Mona Lisa of the Burgess Shales. This specimen, at last, gave scientists a picture of the complete animal. It had plates along its back, and a tail at the rear end. It was a swimmer. And between those two spiked claws at the front there was a mouth Online Radio with teeth. This was the hunter they had been looking for. The scientist who discovered the claws called them anomalocaris, meaning strange shrimp. That name is now used for the whole animal. With its large tail and flexible plates along its flanks, anomalocaris could propel itself through the water at speed. Other specimens show that it could grow to a length of nearly a metre, two feet or so. It was, as far as we know, the first big predator on Earth. We can get clues as to what it was like from an animal that is alive today. It's much smaller than anomalocaris, though remarkably similar. And it lives in Australia, here on the Great Barrier Reef. Professor Justin Marshall has been studying these ferocious and powerful hunters for over years. You have to very cautious about the way you handle them. If you pick them up they can knock the ends off your fingers. Fishermen call them thumb splitters because as they handle them they get thumbs and fingers split open. The other, slightly more technical name for them is mantis shrimp. They have a very ancient ancestry. Fossils of almost identical creatures have been found that date back million years.