Darth gets crabby

Dan Robitzski has a Live Science article about a fossil crab named after Darth Vader:

Photo: New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science

The fossil of an ancient Star Wars Sith Lord from a long time ago, but not quite so far, far away was recently unearthed, a new study reports. Fossilized remains of an extinct species of horseshoe crab, named after Darth Vader because the animal's bizarre shape resembles the Star Wars character's iconic helmet, were discovered in Idaho.
Researchers dubbed the newly discovered, 4-inch-long horseshoe crab Vaderlimulus tricki. The species name tricki honors the man who found the fossil, Trick Runions, who is part of the citizen science Dinosaur Trackers Research Group at the University of Colorado at Denver.
The specimen marks the first time a horseshoe crab from the Triassic, a period lasting from 251 million to 199 million years ago, has been found in North America, the researchers said. The only other North American horseshoe crab fossils come from the Cretaceous, a period that lasted from 145 million to 66 million years ago.
The 245-million-year-old crab is young as far as horseshoe crabs go; the oldest known fossils are from roughly five hundred million years ago, the researchers said. But this "young" creature had "unusual body proportions that give it an odd appearance," study lead author Allan Lerner, a researcher at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque, New Mexico, said in a statement.
V. tricki's bizarre shape indicates that it belongs to the family Austrolimulidae, which has since gone extinct, the researchers said. This could explain why the new fossil's shell looks so different from those of surviving horseshoe crabs; their shared ancestor would have been farther back in the evolutionary timeline, so more mutations and changes could have occurred as different species mutated and broke off from one another, the researchers said.
Members of the Austrolimulidae family lived in the ocean but were venturing into freshwater areas during the Triassic. They often developed bizarre anatomical features that helped them make that transition, the researchers said.
During its lifetime, V. tricki lived on the western coast of the supercontinent Pangaea. The area the animal inhabited was likely a coastline where freshwater and seawater met, the researchers said.
The research, which marks the efforts of researchers from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and the University of Colorado Denver, was published online on 1 December 2017 in the German journal Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie – Abhandlungen (New Yearbook of Geology and Paleontology – Essays).
Despite the countless horseshoe crab species that have existed over hundreds of millions of years, there are just four species of horseshoe crabs known today, and their populations are dropping, the researchers said. They added that horseshoe crabs are not true crabs, but rather are more closely related to scorpions and spiders.
V. tricki is far from the only species named after a Star Wars character. Others include Trigonopterus chewbacca, a tiny, flightless weevil recently discovered in New Guinea, and Tetramorium jedi, an ant species that inhabits the lowland rainforests of Madagascar, Live Science previously reported.

Rico says even scientists have fun with it now and then...