It was almost bound to be small and seemingly insignificant but the oldest species of earth is a shrimp, ironic given the connotations of its name in the English language. Rather than being the runt, the squirt and the general nobody its name implies, this little guy (the Horseshoe shrimp to friends but
Triops cancriformis rather more formally) has staying power. It is almost the same now as it was two hundred million years ago.
So, this little chap wasn’t just around when dinosaurs roamed the earth, it was around when they were evolving. Now researchers from the University of Glasgow in Scotland have discovered two hitherto undiscovered colonies of the rare shrimp. And they did so in quite an unusual manner.
