Homarus morrisi was a lobster that would have looked surprisingly familiar in the Eocene seas of southern England. Its fossil claws include a heavy form with broad crushing teeth and a finer form with narrower grasping edges. Living lobsters of the genus Homarus use differently shaped claws for different tasks, giving us a possible picture of how this ancient animal handled food. Its actual diet, however, has not been established.

But many of its fossils look rather less like a complete lobster than we might expect. Large specimens from the Isle of Sheppey were often crushed or flattened after burial. Their once-rounded shells became distorted, with grooves and other features pushed out of their original positions. Even a well-preserved fossil could therefore give a misleading impression of the living animal.

This created a problem for early palaeontologists. Specimens of H. morrisi had long been confused with another London Clay lobster, Hoploparia gammaroides. When Quayle revisited the fossils in 1987, their surviving claws and shell details helped him separate the two.

The story of Homarus morrisi is both familiar and unexpected: an animal resembling living lobsters, preserved in fossils whose distortion concealed its identity for more than a century.