There's an extinct breed of Hermit Crabs named after Michael Jackson

It's been estimated that we've only discovered about 15% of species currently living on Earth. We are also constantly discovering species that are already extinct. One of these is a species of hermit crabs that was discovered the day that Michael Jackson died. To honor the "King of Pop", the paleontologists who discovered the fossil species named it after him.

Mesoparapylocheles michaeljacksoni was discovered in an abandoned limestone quarry in the foothills of the Pyrenees in the Spanish province of Navarra. "The rocks in the Koskobilo quarry are part of a fossil coral reef with an age of 100 million years," said Adil Klompmaker, a Ph.D. candidate in Department of Geology at Kent State. "This is right in the middle of the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs were dominating the continents.

A crab that lived alongside the dinosaurs has been named after the King of Pop. The species has one living relative, that being Parapylocheles scorpio which lives in deep waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, unlike the shallow waters that the michaeljacksoni lived in.

According to Klonpmaker, the shields of hermit crabs are much rarer than those of true crabs, so it was pretty good timing on this one.

(Source)