A vicissicaudatan arthropod from the Silurian Herefordshire Lagerstätte, UK

A new arthropod, Carimersa neptuni gen. et sp. nov., is described from the Silurian (Wenlock Series) Herefordshire Konservat-Lagerstätte, UK. The head bears pedunculate eyes and five pairs of appendages. Triflagellate antennae are followed by two pairs of uniramous limbs each with an endopod bearing a pronounced gnathobasic basipod. The posterior two pairs of head limbs and all trunk limbs bear an endopod, exopod and filamentous exite. The trunk consists of ten appendage-bearing segments followed by an apodous abdomen of four segments. The arthropod resolves as sister taxon to Kodymirus and Eozetetes + Aglaspidida. It is the first representative of Vicissicaudata reported from the Herefordshire Lagerstätte and the first Silurian example with well preserved appendages. The preservation of a cluster of radiolarians apparently captured by the trunk appendages is the first direct association of predator and prey discovered in the Herefordshire fauna and suggests that Carimersa was a nektobe..., The concretion was serially ground at intervals of 30 μm apart from the antennae and telson which were ground at 20 μm. The surfaces were photographed under a thin layer of water with a Leica DFC420 digital camera mounted ona Leica MZ8 binocular microscope. The SPIERS software suite (www.spiers-software.org) was used to remove extraneousmaterial from the images and to reconstruct the VAXML 3D model., VAXML dataset provides the 3D model as a series of STL files, supplemented by a VAXML metadata file that describes names of objects, suggested colours, scaling information, etc. See www.spiers-software.org for a description of VAXML, and a free multi-platform viewer.
Raw data comprises ZIP files, each containing a series of images captured during physical-optical tomography (BMP format). Scaling for these images is as follows, given as pixels/mm in tomograms : micron-interval between tomograms.
Zip files are A-D, from anterior (A) to posterior (D) of the specimen
A: 71 : 20B: 40.5 : 30C: 40.5 : 30D: 71 : 20