Ancient Shrimp with Glasgow origins named weegie in honour of city

A type of shrimp that died out hundreds of millions of years ago has been declared a new species and a Glaswegian.

The shrimp is believed to have swam in the Carboniferous seas surrounding Glasgow around 333 million years ago. Its fossil was found at the same world-famous locality where the Bearsden Shark was excavated in the early 1980s.

The shrimp has been given the name Tealliocaris weegie after a scientific paper identified it as a Glaswegian crustacean. Its authors thought that it would be appropriate to name the new species in honour of the people of Glasgow and the local dialect.

The paper was recently published in the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s journal Earth and Environmental Science Transactions.