#cambriart - my art and fact posts that include my art
my ask box and submission box are open, feel free to ask or send anything Cambrian-related
also feel free to tag me in Cambrian posts and sent me your Cambrian art :]
i have characters based off various Cambrian creatures that will be included in my art posts sometimes, you can also treat this like an ask blog and ask them questions if you’d like
we’re gonna be having a hard time with funds until our lease ends in June. It has been impossible for me to find a job, in the rare case that I do it doesn’t last either because of discrimination or failure to accommodate to my disabilities. Help us stay afloat until our lease ends
The Anomalocaris is the- hey, where did he go? Doesn’t he know that we can’t do this post without him? We need to find a new little guy, and we need to do it quick… wait, who’s this?
oh my god.. oh god, I’m gonna be sick. I mean uhhh… This is called the uh.. the Chud. He’s microscopic, the size of the average redditor’s penis. He’s been extinct for millions of years, but if you ₛᵩᵤᵢₙₜ, you can still smell him.
we’re gonna be having a hard time with funds until our lease ends in June. It has been impossible for me to find a job, in the rare case that I do it doesn’t last either because of discrimination or failure to accommodate to my disabilities. Help us stay afloat until our lease ends
we’re gonna be having a hard time with funds until our lease ends in June. It has been impossible for me to find a job, in the rare case that I do it doesn’t last either because of discrimination or failure to accommodate to my disabilities. Help us stay afloat until our lease ends
we’re gonna be having a hard time with funds until our lease ends in June. It has been impossible for me to find a job, in the rare case that I do it doesn’t last either because of discrimination or failure to accommodate to my disabilities. Help us stay afloat until our lease ends
"Nestled on the water's bottom of silt and plant debris are juvenile and adult Diplocaulus with a coiled Lysorophus. Both Lysorophus and juvenile Diplocaulus were amphibians which could burrow within the mud and aestivate to survive droughts until rains replenished their water-holes. However, in addition to being too large, the expanded crescent-shaped skulls of adult Diplocaulus prevented them from being able to burrow and survive by aestivating. Lysorophus reached lengths of 60 cms (2 ft) and full grown Diplocaulus were as much as 1 m (3 ft) long."
From Dinosaurs: A Global View (1990) by Sylvia J. Czerkas & Stephen A. Czerkas. Illustrated by Douglas Henderson, Mark Hallett, John Sibbick.
Wild. I was so sure that someone had made a worm-on-a-string out of gelatin, but nope! Real animal. Bonkers. Add it to the list of Weird Things Under The Sea.
Yesss the gelatinous weevil!!!! Borzoi larvae!!! Apparently they have pretty advanced eyes and are known to be curious of divers and follow them around
Ascidians are soft bodied animals, and for this reason, their fossil record is almost entirely lacking. The earliest reliable ascidians is Shankouclava shankouense from the Lower Cambrian Maotianshan Shale (Yunnan, South China).
Osteostracans were an ancient group of jawless fish, closely related to early jawed vertebrates, whose fossils are known from the mid-Silurian to the late Devonian of what is now North America, Europe, and Asia.
They were heavily armored, with bony head shields and rows of large scales covering their bodies. While their flattened shapes and upward-facing eyes have resulted in them traditionally being interpreted as mud-grubbing bottom-dwellers, their paddle-shaped pectoral fins, dorsal fins, and strong tails indicate they were also quite good swimmers – and their diverse hydrodynamic head shield shapes suggest they probably had a much wider range of ecologies than previously thought.
Although many osteostracans had large flaring spines on the sides of their heads, or long snout-like spikes at the front, Tauraspis rara here was unique in having two long front-facing horn-like projections.
Around 7.5cm long (~3"), it lived in brackish and freshwater environments in what is now northern Siberia during the early Devonian, about 410-407 million years ago. Like other osteostracans it had a small keyhole-shaped "nostril" opening, and large patches of sensory organs known as "cephalic fields" on the sides and top of its head shield.
The fields were covered with a mosaic of small bony plates, and their exact function is still a mystery – but they may have been involved in sensing vibrations in the water, or possibly even been electric organs.
Similarly, what Tauraspis used its unusual pair of "horns" for is also unknown.
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References:
Ferrón, Humberto G., et al. "Computational fluid dynamics suggests ecological diversification among stem-gnathostomes." Current Biology 30.23 (2020): 4808-4813. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.09.031
Janvier, Philippe. Early vertebrates. Oxford University Press, 1996. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/294830957_Early_vertebrates
King, Benedict, Yuzhi Hu, and John A. Long. "Electroreception in early vertebrates: survey, evidence and new information." Palaeontology 61.3 (2018): 325-358. https://doi.org/10.1111/pala.12346
Mark-Kurik, Elga, and Philippe Janvier. "Early Devonian osteostracans from Severnaya Zemlya, Russia." Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 15.3 (1995): 449-462. https://doi.org/10.1080/02724634.1995.10011241
Wikipedia contributors. “Osteostraci” Wikipedia, 25 Jan. 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteostraci
Very massive! Especially by Permian standards. Though it’s hard to say just exactly how large it would have been in life based on the material we have.
By looking at what is preserved and making inferences about proportions based on close relatives, we can get a decent idea of how large this thing could’ve gotten. But again, we don’t really have an exact estimate. We just know it’s massive.
traveled back in time . took a piece off one of these motherfuckers and ate it, now the universe is playing a cruel joke on me where it detaches me from my body and makes me experience and perceive everything from the lens of this fish. fuck my stupid primordial life
we could’ve had tree sized fungus but then some dumbass fish decided to slither out of the primordial soup. every time I think of this I’m filled with inconceivable rage
