There is a saying: ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’. Right? Perhaps we will leave the naming dilemma for later and examine why we are spotlighting an animal few readers will ever encounter.
It is mostly because it has something for almost anyone interested in biolog y. Its evolutionary history can be traced back almost half a billion years. In 2020, researchers described a fossil found in what had been a seashore environment 480 million years ago and named it Lunataspis aurora, meaning literally ‘crescent moon shield of the dawn’. The resemblance to modern-day horseshoe crabs was unmistakable, and fossils from the Jurassic period are indistinguishable from animals that have hoovered along seashores ever since (see Figure 1).
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