The scientific community is buzzing over a 430-million-year-old bug known as the “kite runner.”
Aquilonifer spinosus has one unusual way of caring for its young: the ancient arthropod carried them around in miniature pouches tethered to the creature’s body, according to a Yale University statement.
The kite runner has long since died out, perhaps because this unusual method of toting around its young was disadvantageous to its survival. The bug reached about a half inch long at the longest, and lived with shrimps and worms on the sea floor. Scientists named it the “kite runner” after the Khalid Hosseini novel, because the tethered young sort of resembled kites.
Scientists don’t know much about the species. Just one specimen has ever been found, in England, and it was a mother with 10 smaller kite runners tethered to it.
“Modern crustaceans employ a variety of strategies to protect their eggs and embryos from predators — attaching them to the limbs, holding them under the carapace, or enclosing them within a special pouch until they are old enough to be released — but this example is unique,” lead author Derek Briggs, Yale’s G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Geology and Geophysics and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, said in the statement. “Nothing is known today that attaches the young by threads to its upper surface.”
He added: “We have named it after the novel by Khalid Hosseini due to the fancied resemblance of the juveniles to kites. As the parent moved around, the juveniles would have looked like decorations or kites attached to it. It shows that arthropods evolved a variety of brooding strategies beyond those around today — perhaps this strategy was less successful and became extinct.”