text: A weird new species of ancient predatory cockroach has been discovered preserved in amber. 
   
   The cockroach is thought to have lived 100 million years ago, and it looks little like its modern relatives. 
   
   After the first look I knew it was something new 
   
   The tiny monster, measuring just under 1 cm, hosts a weird amalgam of unique features making it look like a chimera of a crane fly, a praying mantis and a cockroach. 
   
   The discovery adds to the number of ferocious cockroaches known to have lived in prehistoric times. 
   
   The new specimen Manipulator modificaputis belongs to an ancient family of cockroaches, called the Manipulatoridae. 
   
   It has a triangular, manoeuvrable head, with large eyes, set upon a long neck, features that likely helped it hunt its prey. The cockroach also had a narrow body and wings, elongated legs and mouthparts, and an extra set of modified eyes located on the top of its head, which likely helped it spot predators, such as the feathered dinosaurs living at the time. 
   
   This little monster was a solitary hunter 
   
   The cockroach was found preserved in amber by German researcher Ziggi Ellenberger in modern day Myanmar. 
   
   At first, scientists thought the cockroach might have been a mantis. 
   
   But an examination by Dr Peter Vršanský, from the Geological Institute of Bratislava and the Slovak Academy of Sciences revealed it to be something different. “After the first look I knew it was something new,” he told BBC Earth. “Nothing similar runs on Earth today.” 
   
   Vršanský made the discovery, reported in the journal Geologica Carpathica along with Günter Bechly, from the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany. 
   
   They believe the cockroach hunted at night. 
   
   “This little monster was a solitary hunter, able to run very fast, with a body unlike the vast majority of cockroaches living today, it posed high above ground, frequently taking flight when necessary, and seizing its prey with strong short spines developed on its extremely long feet,” he adds. 
   
   Not all scientists agree on the cockroach’s hunting skills though. Manipulator had long and weak legs, and was unlikely to run fast, says Dr Alexandr Rasnitsyn, a professor from the Palaeontological Institute, at the Russian Academy of Sciences. 
   
   He thinks it was more likely to surprise rather than chase its prey, using its long limbs to traverse gaps between forest leaves. 
   
   The new discovery in among a number of ancient cockroaches found in Myanmar. 
   
   Many were predatory insects that evolved to rule the night. “Especially drastic and brutal were top predatory Raphidiomimidae. Cockroaches with a wingspan up to 20cm and eyes divided into two parts, with gut containing large pieces of demolished insects,” says Vršanský. 
   
   Most of these ferocious lineages went extinct, however, with only one lineage surviving today: the praying mantis, which belongs to the same superorder of the cockroaches. ||||| Paleontologists working in Morocco have found a fossil of a bizarre sea creature that could grow up to seven feet in length and gathered plankton like a whale. 
   
   The newly discovered animal, dubbed Aegirocassis benmoulae, is an early member of the arthropod family tree, making it an ancient ancestor of cockroaches, butterflies and shrimp. It lived about 480 million years ago in a shallow sea that once covered part of the Sahara Desert. 
   
   "It is one of the biggest arthropods that ever existed, far bigger than any arthropod today," said Peter Van Roy, a paleobiologist at Yale University who helped uncover some of specimens of the extinct animal. 
   
   A paper describing this strange early arthropod was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. 
   
   Aegirocassis benmoulae is part of an extinct group of animals known as anomalocaridid, which were already known to be the largest animals of the Cambrian time period 543 million to 490 million years ago. Aegirocassis is the most recent of these animals to be found and more than double the size of the biggest of its older known relatives. 
   
   It lived during the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, about 10 million years after the Cambrian period came to a close. 
   
   All of the anamolocardids were flat-bodied water dwellers, and all of them had two appendages in the front of their mouths. These structures were mostly used to grasp prey like worms and mollusks. However, Aegirocassis modified these appendages, creating an elaborate netlike structure of spikes that allowed it to catch the rapidly diversifying plankton found in the water column at the time. 
   
   Despite its large size, Aegirocassis appears to have been fairly common, Van Roy said. He and the Moroccan fossil collector Mohamed Ben Moula, who first discovered these large animals, have found dozens of preserved specimens in the Moroccan desert. 
   
   "They may have come together to molt, or they may have lived in a group," he said. "It is interesting we found so many of them. It shows there was a well developed, rich plankton system in place 480 million years ago." 
   
   Arthropods first showed up in the fossil record about 530 million years ago, and today the phylum consists of the most morphologically diverse group of animals on the planet. 
   
   However, early fossils of arthropods are hard to come by, which made this particular find so exciting. 
   
   Most fossils are the remains of the hard parts of organisms, like shells and bone, because soft tissues decay so rapidly after death, explained John Paterson, an associate professor at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, who was not involved in the study. 
   
   "However, these extraordinary fossils are soft-bodied, which are typically very rare," he said. "They require rapid burial and low oxygen conditions in order to be preserved in such exquisite detail." 
   
   According to Van Roy, giant storms occasionally caused large mud flows to wash into the ancient sea, smothering everything at the bottom and making it inaccessible for scavengers. 
   
   "If you have the right sediments and they react with the right decay products, then you can basically turn soft tissues to stone," he said. "But a very specific set of criteria must be met, so sites like this are extremely rare." 
   
   The fossils were so well preserved that they allowed researchers to see a previously hidden feature on the body of these early arthropods, helping them to solve a longstanding evolutionary mystery. 
   
   The success of arthropods is associated with the way they are constructed. Their bodies and legs are made of multiple segments that can be be modified for a variety of purposes, allowing them to adapt to a wide range of environments. 
   
   "Morphologically, they are incredibly plastic," Van Roy said. 
   
   Today, the legs of most arthropods have two branches, but researchers were not sure how these double-branched limbs had evolved over time. 
   
   Paleontologists thought they could trace the origins of this double-branched limb to an arthropod ancestor from the early Cambrian. This ancient animal had a set of flaps that ran down the top side of its body for swimming, representing an upper limb, and a set of legs on its belly side, for walking. 
   
   And yet, previous studies of anamolocardids, a later arthropod, had found just one set of flaps on the lower side of the body. This led researchers to wonder where the upper limb had gone. 
   
   The new fossils described in the Nature paper suggest that the second limb did not go anywhere. They show that anamolocardids did have a second set of swimming flaps on the back side of their segments, but they have only been preserved in these particularly complete fossils. 
   
   "These flaps represent the precursors of more modern-style (two-branched) limbs that we see in other arthropods," Paterson said via email. 
   
   Van Roy said there were still many more fossils to go through from the Moroccan site. 
   
   "We have something like 5,000 or 6,000 specimens, most of them unstudied," he said. 
   
   Among the other animals they found are more advanced arthropods, a variety of horseshoe crabs, some which look remarkably like modern-day horseshoe crabs, jellyfish relatives, and early starfish and snails. 
   
   "There are a lot of really exciting things coming," he said. 
   
   Science rules! Follow me @DeborahNetburn and "like" Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.
target: – A mean-looking cockroach that lived alongside the dinosaurs had a long neck, swiveling head, and elongated legs that enabled it to surprise prey, New Scientist reports via Gizmodo. Found embedded in amber in Myanmar, the 100-million-year-old insect resembles a cross between a roach, a crane fly, and a praying mantis: "After the first look I knew it was something new," Slovak scientist Peter Vršanský tells the BBC. "Nothing similar runs on Earth today." Vršanský and German colleague Günter Bechly, who revealed the appetizing bug together in the journal Geologica Carpathica, say it likely hunted at night. "This little monster was a solitary hunter, able to run very fast, with a body unlike the vast majority of cockroaches living today," explains Vršanský. It "frequently" took flight and grabbed prey "with strong short spines developed on its extremely long feet," he adds. Called Manipulator modificaputis, it also had an extra set of eyes on top of its head, probably to spot predators like feathered dinosaurs. On the stomach-settling side, it measured less than half an inch long. So it's not as scary as other insect predators back then, like the Raphidiomimidae—which were "especially drastic and brutal," Vršanský says. They were bug-eating roaches "with a wingspan up to 20cm [nearly 8 inches] and eyes divided into two parts." But compare that to Aegirocassis benmoulae, a 7-foot "bizarre sea creature" 480 million years ago that is an ancient cockroach relative and caught plankton like a whale, the LA Times reports. (Or read about an ancient, fearsome sea creature with "curved teeth the size of bananas.")