中国科学院南京地质古生物研究所机构知识库

The hymenocarines were a major and diverse group of euarthropods featured by a bivalved head carapace and a segmented trunk comprising tergo-pleural rings notably from the Cambrian Burgess Shale-type Lager-statten. Here we document a new similar to 50 mm long hymenocarine Xiazhuangocaris chenggongensis n. gen. n. sp. from the Xiazhuang fossil assemblage, a slightly younger occurrence of the Chengjiang Lager-statte within the lower Cambrian Hongjingshao Formation (Cambrian Series 2, Stage 3) in Chenggong, Yunnan, southwestern China. X. chenggongensis is characterized by the bivalved carapace with each valve bearing a protruded anterior tip and a prominent posterior notch, which resembles the P-element of the radiodont Hurdia and is unique among the hymenocarines. The trunk consists of at least 13 tergo-pleural rings including presumably eight abdominal ones terminating in a pair of ovate caudal rami. With the body organization and morphological features closest to waptiids, X. chenggongensis represents a 'larger' waptiid-like hymenocarine. The morphometric analysis recognizes the family-level groupings of Cambrian hymenocarines based on the number of tergo-pleural rings and the proportion of exposed trunk length, indicating that these are useful characters for studying hymenocarine morphology and phylogeny. Cambrian hymenocarines exhibited great interspecific body size variations even between sister species of the same family, further suggesting that niche diversification happened on the family level and even among phylogenetically close genera or species during the Cambrian explosion. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. and Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, CAS. All rights reserved.