Our planet's convoluted history of evolving life has spawned countless weird and wonderful creatures, but none excite evolutionary biologists – or divide taxonomists – quite like crabs.
With their species richness, extravagant array of body shapes and rich fossil record, crabs are an ideal group to study trends in biodiversity through time. But finding some order in the chaos of crabs is an ongoing challenge.It gets weirder, because not every crab is a crab, so to speak. There are 'true' crabs, such as mud crabs and swimmer crabs. Yet we also have so-called false crabs, such as shell-shy hermit crabs with their spiraling abdomens, or the spike-covered king crabs.
Both true and false crabs evolved their wide, flat, hard upper shell and tucked tails independently of one another, from a common ancestor that had none of those features,published in March 2021, led by evolutionary biologist Joanna Wolfe of Harvard University.
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