First animal to wear exoskeleton armour
Meet the “walking cactus”, a 520-million-year-old fossil animal that is helping work out how animals first strapped on armour to defend themselves against early predators. It was 540 million years ago that arthropods evolved their exoskeleton – an innovation that has helped them become the most abundant animal group on the planet, with over a million species described to date. Image: Jianni Liu
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