the most primitive malacostracan group, because they lack some of the caridoid facies, such as the presence of seven abdominal segments (eight if telson is included). Furthermore, one study by Wills places them as a sister branch to the Cephalocarida and basal to a Maxillopoda + Eumalacostraca clade and therefore making the Malacostraca paraphyletic. The Eumalacostraca — the malacostraca minus the phyllocarida — were subdivided on the basis of several features, although which group is basal is unclear. Several authors, such as Siewin (1963), believe that the Syncarida is the most basal group due to the absence of morphological traits that are present in the remaining eumalacostracans; in addition, the Syncarida are distributed worldwide in reclusive habitats such as interstitial and groundwater, whereas their extensive fossil record shows that they were once marine, implying that the species present today are remnants of a more abundant group. A second problematic group often attributed to be basal in the Eumalacostraca clade is the Hoplocarida. This group is composed of 200 species commonly called mantis shrimps, which are found in shallow tropical and subtropical marine habitats that have adapted to a predatorial life thanks to their specialized large second pair of thoracopods (thoracic appendices), raptorial legs, which are used to capture prey, in fact their name is a combination of Greek words meaning “armed shrimp”. Its precise location amongst the Malacostraca is unclear and has been proposed to be a sister group to the remaining eumalacostracans due to its ancient fossil record but it has also been placed either sister to the Eucarida or even inside the Eucarida by molecular studies. In fact, the Malacostracan has a well-documented fossil record, that, although patchy or missing entirely (ghost lineage) for certain clades, offer a unique opportunity to analyse the morphology of the ancestral taxa of a clade or a dead-end sister taxa (plesion), whose age (determined by its stratigraphy) gives an estimate of how long has a group been around. However, the major limitation to fossilized samples is that typically the soft parts do not fossilize and are therefore lost, as a consequence a much more limited amount of information that can be gathered. Furthermore, some taxa may not fossilize well, and therefore leave no trace even though they existed, when this occurs in the fossil record, the period where the taxa are expected to appear is called a ghost range. Eucarida Eucarida is