(Ecns.cn)--Recently, a river creature resembling both a fish and a shrimp was discovered in the Jialu River in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province.
They swim upside-down and have black eyes, brown bodies, and red tails. Each of them, less than two centimeters in length, has more than 10 pairs of swimming legs.
The creature is known as a fairy shrimp, a member of Anostraca, one of the four orders of crustaceans in the class Branchiopoda.
They usually live in vernal pools and hypersaline lakes around the world and have a rather short life span of two to three months.
Fairy shrimp have a long fossil record, which includes the oldest known Branchiopoda fossil—Rehbachiella kinnekullensis—from Orsten marine deposits of the Upper Cambrian age of nearly 500 million years ago, according to Wikipedia.
