A bizarre shrimp-like creature which lived 430m years ago and carried its young in capsules tethered to its body like tiny, swirling kites - has been dug up - in England.
The tiny creature was found in Herefordshire in one of England's richest deposits of soft-bodied fossils and has been named after bestselling novel 'The Kite Runner'.
It shows 10 juveniles - at different stages of development - connected to the adult meaning molting was postponed until after they were old enough to hatch.
Otherwise they would have been cast aside with the shed exoskeleton.
Aquilonifer spinosus - which comes from 'aquila' which is Latin for eagle or kite and the suffix 'fer' to carry - had no eyes and was covered by a shield-like structure.
It lived on the ocean floor during the Silurian Period - 444 to 416 million years ago - with a variety of other animals including sponges, worms, snails, a sea spider, a horseshoe crab and a sea star.
The juvenile pouches - attached to the adult by slender, flexible threads - look like flattened lemons.
Professor Derek Briggs, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in Connecticut, said: "Modern crustaceans employ a variety of strategies to protect their eggs and embryos from predators - attaching them to the limbs, holding them under the carapace, or enclosing them within a special pouch until they are old enough to be released - but this example is unique.
"Nothing is known today that attaches the young by threads to its upper surface."
He and his colleagues considered the possibility the juveniles were parasites feeding off a host but decided it was unlikely because the attachment position would not be favourable for accessing nutrients.
Prof Briggs said: "We have named it after the novel by Khalid Hosseini due to the fancied resemblance of the juveniles to kites.
"As the parent moved around the juveniles would have looked like decorations or kites attached to it.
"It shows arthropods evolved a variety of brooding strategies beyond those around today - perhaps this strategy was less successful and became extinct."
The researchers described Aquilonifer spinosus in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in detail thanks to a virtual reconstruction of the animal and the attached juveniles by stacking digital images of fossil surfaces revealed by grinding it away in tiny increments.
This disclosed the unique brooding strategy in which the juveniles latched onto adults - long before kangaroos carried their joeys in their pouches and honey bees nurtured their young in hives.