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You • may • not • like • it • but • this • is • what • peak • performance • looks • like 🦀
So like I know horseshoe crabs have been around nearly unchanged and all. And good for them!
But are you (general you, not op specifically) really trying to tell me that not once in their entire historical span of time on earth… not one single time did anything evolve from a horseshoe crab?
Clearly I’m not saying the whole species changed, but that is separate from an offshoot population evolving into something different. Which surely must have happened, no?
No reason to evolve if you’re already a crab.
Not even a crab, the Horseshoe is way more primitive
Two things: first, horseshoe crabs almost certainly have changed/evolved considerably over four hundred million years, just in aspects of their physiology that aren’t fossilized. Second, horseshoe crabs have like nine different types of eyes; even that tail is essentially one big eye, covered in photoreceptive cells. We humans consider ourselves the “dominant” species, but I don’t think we could handle crawling around in slime and mud for four hundred million years quite as well as they have.
Why aren’t these things considered Trilobites exactly? They look like Trilobites and I’m pretty sure they fill some of the same general niches? Is it just a taxonomical thing? Are they just not in the right clade?
Not in the right clade, basically.
They look similar, but aren’t directly related. It’s similar to why legless lizards aren’t snakes, and bats aren’t birds.
But snakes are legless lizards. Link to youtube
Edit: Wrong link, I’ll leave the previous one anyways because it’s also fun https://youtu.be/_5jNZyoSszE
Fair. I should have said that many legless lizards aren’t snakes.
Even the speech bubbles look like them
Aren’t these the guys who drink blueberry smoothies?
Yeah then they go down the waterslide
Who knew horseshoe crabs were the Pikachu’s of the sea?
Perfection is the end of evolution, it’s a far predecessor of spiders and scorpions
