If bug eyes freak you out--and let's face it, we never can quite tell what they're looking at with all those facets--you might not want to read any further. Because new fossil research now indicates there once swam a creature on earth with thousands upon thousands of eyes attached to its head.

At first glance, you might think the Anomalocaris had just two see-holes like the rest of us critters. Until recently, that's what scientists thought, too. Fossils of the creature up until this point just featured vague, pear-shaped impressions of the eyes. It was an aquatic creature, so we figured it had eyes like other aquatic creatures of its type--that is to say, not particularly special ones. And sure, the Anomalocaris might be a little funny-looking, what with its weird mouth tentacles and undulating fins, but the earth has housed some pretty bizarre organisms over its years. Nothing to be particularly alarmed about here, right?

Well, not so much. A new fossil of the Anomalocaris with exceptional detail of the eye area now shows that the 515-million-year-old predator had 16,000 individual eyes attached to each of its eye stalks. They were all clumped together like one big eye, but the lenses were distinct. Researchers have stated that the animal probably had very good eyesight for its time. You think?

The finding suggests that the compound eye is a lot older than we had previously thought. It probably evolved as a hunting tool, allowing predators to spot smaller prey more quickly and with more accuracy. Scientists have hypothesized that many different types of underwater predators competed during the Cambrian period, leading to many neat evolutionary innovations like those crazy eyes and exoskeletons. The Anomalocaris likely evolved eventually into the modern arthropods we know and love (or maybe not) today. 

All those lenses and that spectacular vision gave the Anomalocaris an edge in the underwater predator scene. At about a meter long, he was a big and fearsome critter to behold. Technically, he's more of a bug than a squid, but those curling front appendages do remind me of tentacles. Actually, he probably looks most like an underwater version of the headcrabs from Half Life--which is to say, not something I'd want to stumble upon while scuba diving off the Australian coast. The Anomalocaris died out plenty long ago, though, so there's no danger of odd flounder-squid-crabs popping up during your down-under getaway.