I find these fascinating creatures and very prehistoric looking. As I am sharing from my archives and looking at a lot of old blog posts to reshare, I found this. We were in Virginia Beach walking along the sand. It is a shell of an old Horseshoe crab. I wondered if its demise was caused by a hungry gull. There footprints were everywhere, as you might expect from a walk on the beach.
Horseshoe crabs are marine anthropods of the family Limulidae and order Xiphosura or Xiphosurida that live primarily in and around shallow waters on soft sandy or muddy bottoms.
A horsehoe crab is best described as a 'living fossil', an ancient, armored arthropod that has remained virtually unchanged for over 450 million years, predating even the dinosaurs. Despite their name they are not true crabs, but more closely related to spiders and scorpions.
There is an amazing amount of information about them online, but I will finish here.
If you want to find out more, you can go to this link. The following photo I found on pixabay.com
Thanks for looking and I hope you are having a great week so far.
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