Someone Go Back in Time and Step on This

Four hundred and twenty-five million years ago, a strange creature shaped like a Christmas tree roamed the Earth – which makes it surprisingly young.

This 2-centimetre-long fossil arthropod, named Enalikter aphson, was found in rocks in Herefordshire, UK. It is the most recent addition to the megacheira, an extinct group of marine arthropods – and finding it in the 425-million-year-old rocks could indicate that megacheirans were distant ancestors of all arthropods alive today, including lobsters and spiders.