Scientists Find a 245-Million-Year-Old Horseshoe Crab Fossil That Resembles Darth Vader

Horseshoe crabs have scuttled through Earth’s shallow ocean waters for hundreds of millions of years, but scientists recently discovered the fossil of one that looks like it’s from a galaxy far, far away. As Newsweek reports, the 245-million-year-old creature’s shell is shaped like Darth Vader’s helmet, which prompted researchers to name the prehistoric critter Vaderlimulus tricki. (Tricki pays homage to Trick Runions, the man who found the fossil.)

Paleontologists from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and the University of Colorado described the Vader horseshoe crab in a new report published in the German journal Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie. Discovered in Idaho, Vaderlimulus tricki lived during the late Triassic era and belonged to a now-extinct family called Austrolimulidae. During its lifetime, it inhabited the western coast of the supercontinent Pangea.

Vaderlimulus tricki's unique shell can be chalked up to evolution, scientists explain in a news release, as the creatures were “expanding their ecological range from marine into freshwater settings during the Triassic and often exhibit body modifications that provide them with a bizarre appearance by modern standards."

Horseshoe crabs have survived at least 470 million years on Earth, and are often referred to as “living fossils.” But individual species died out over the millennia (only four are currently alive today), and fossils of horseshoe crabs are few and far between. When new ones are discovered, they often belong to a species that was previously unknown to science. Vaderlimulus tricki, in particular, is the first horseshoe crab from the Triassic period to have been found in North America.