Whatâs the most (not really useless) but useless extinct animal you can think of? Like just âwhy the hell was this here? What niche could it have possibly filled?â Those are my favorite kinds of animals
this is opabinia. the absolute magnum opus of evolution. when the body plan was revealed at a presentation, the entire audience laughed. and for a while, nobody knew what ecological niche it could possibly have filled. however, the finding and analysis of opabinia revealed a wealth of information about the diversity of early life on earth.
opabinia has an extremely unique body form, with a hollow proboscis, 15 body segments, and five eyes. âhow the hell did this happen?â you may ask. the same question was asked by paleontologists studying the cambrian explosion. and the answer was very important to our understanding of the first major diversification of animals.
the researcher whittington, who introduced the modern design of opabinia, stated that it, along with other cambrian creatures, didnt âfitâ into any modern taxonomic groups. this hinted at something important; early life was unusually experimental, which meant that it was possible that unusual evolutionary mechanisms were at play at the time.
stephen jay gould (one of the most important paleontologists of all time) wrote that
I believe that Whittingtonâs reconstruction of Opabinia in 1975 will stand as one of the great documents in the history of human knowledge. How many other empirical studies have led directly on to a fundamentally revised view about the history of life?
We are awestruck by Tyrannosaurus; we marvel at the feathers of Archaeopteryx; we revel in every scrap of fossil human bone from Africa. But none of these has taught us anywhere near so much about the nature of evolution as a little two-inch Cambrian oddball invertebrate named Opabinia.
(from a wonderful life, which he wanted to call homage to opabinia)
we now know that opabinia most likely used its proboscis (the thing coming out of its face) to search for and pass captured food to its mouth. we also know that opabinia was probably a carnivore. but the introduction of opabinia, with its extremely unique body form, revealed major things about the nature of evolution itself.
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