Imagine you are swimming in the cool waters of a calm sea. Beneath the surface lies a field of color revealing itself and dancing in the shifting light. Then suddenly a creature from the depths appears, swimming closer and closer in a frightening blur of spindly legs and gnashing teeth.

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LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Before you get too frightened, take a breath and relax. The creature has been dead for 520-million-years, leaving you free to swim to your heart's delight.

The creature, Chengiangocaris kunmingensis, or simply C. kunmingensis, has long been extinct, but a beautifully preserved fossil of the shrimplike creature's nervous system has been discovered beneath Southern China.

Biologist Javier Ortega-Hernández explained C. kunmingensis stuck to the bottom of the sea, where it scooped food into its mouth with a large pair of legs close to its face, sported an armored head, and had a long segmented body with three or four pairs of legs protruding from each one.

The fossil was discovered to have a "ropelike" central nerve cord that traveled the length of its body and formed nerve clusters in several areas.

Researchers noted the masses, called "ganglia," became progressively smaller as the central nerve cord spanned the creature's body. Interestingly, the ganglia each associated with a pair of C. kunmingensis' 80 legs.

Ortega-Hernández explained C. kunmingensis could grow up to six-inches-long and had "at least 80 legs! ...

"Our jaws dropped when we put the specimens under the microscope and observed the fine nerves on the sides," he gushed. "It was hard to believe that something so small would be preserved along with the main nerve cord, but even more so because they show a unique organization that is otherwise unknown in living arthropods."

Until the discovery, all researchers knew of the creature had been gleaned from records of bones, teeth, shells and other organic structures since soft tissues like nervous systems and organs deteriorate at a faster rate.

Ortega-Hernández believes the specimen had been caught beneath a fine sediment and died in an environment that did not allow oxygen to reach and deteriorate it.

"Eventually the carcasses become preserved in the fossil record, and the limited decay allows for the preservation of amazing morphological detail," Ortega-Hernández explained.

The findings have been published in the science journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and images of the fossil are available at the Cambrian Creatures Gallery: Photos of Primitive Sea Life, the Image Gallery: Bizarre Cambrian Creature and the Gallery: Amazing Cambrian Fossils from Canada's Marble Canyon.

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