Photos: Ancient Crab is the Strangest You've Ever Seen

Giant eyes

Here is an illustration of Callichimaera perplexa, quite possibly the strangest looking crab that ever lived.

[Read more about the strange crab]

Crabby fossil

Yale paleontologist Javier Luque found C. perplexa in Colombia in 2005. Since then, C. perplexa specimens have also turned up in Wyoming and Morocco.

Tiny crab

C. perplexa lived during the last dinosaur age, the Cretaceous period, about 95 million years ago.

Crustacean diversity

Crabs come in many shapes and sizes. But C. perplexa (center) might be the strangest of all of them. It has giant baby-like eyes, a lobster-like shell, the claws of a frog crab and paddles like an ancient sea scorpion.

Excavation

Paleontologist Javier Luque searches for fossil crabs in the Colombian Andes.

Amazing find

This extinct crab is a chimera, meaning it combines traits from several extinct and living crabs and crustaceans.

Digging away

Luque (left) and Catalina Suarez, with the Colombian Geological Survey (center) dig for fossils in the Colombian Andes.

[Read more about the strange crab]

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Laura is the managing editor at Live Science. She also runs the archaeology section and the Life's Little Mysteries series. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Scholastic, Popular Science and Spectrum, a site on autism research. She has won multiple awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association for her reporting at a weekly newspaper near Seattle. Laura holds a bachelor's degree in English literature and psychology from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in science writing from NYU.