#cambrian

[alrightsatellite]

i knew it

Sauce: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN8J4KYsS/

[252mya]

How do you get an entire animal wrong? Twice. Charles Walcott found the first fossils of Hallucigenia sparsa in 1911 and called it a bristle worm. In 1977 Simon Conway Morris realized it was something stranger and gave it its striking new name, but he reconstructed it upside-down and back-to-front. Spikes as legs. Tentacles waving from the back. What he called the head was actually a decaying gut. The upside-down was fixed in 1991 when a Chinese specimen revealed a second row of legs. In 2015, better Burgess Shale fossils finally showed the real head at the opposite end, with a pair of tiny eyes and a ring of teeth around the mouth. Named for its bizarre, dream-like appearance. About the size of your fingernail. A Cambrian lobopodian and a distant cousin of modern velvet worms. Art by Andrey Atuchin.

[paleoart]

POV: You took a GoPro to the Cambrian Patreon • Ko-fi • BlueSky  • Instagram • Prints & Merch  

[wodeworm]

Trilobite Shaman

[sexy-hallucigenia]

Hallucigenia

Of course, I had to have my first post be about the creature this blog is named for. Look at this horrible worm.

This thing is so weird, even amongst the weirdness of the Cambrian, that scientists were unsure of which part was the head and which was the tail, or for that matter which set of appendages it used to walk.

They belong to the clade Panarthropoda which includes modern arthropods, tardigrades, and velvet worms, but is part of an extinct group of worms in this clade called lobopodians. Lobopodians are all pretty weird, essentially being described as marine worms with stubby legs. In fact we spent so much time trying to figure out just what this thing is, we still don't know that much about how it lived, other than educated guesses.

It's possible that the little tentacle appendages near its face would pick up particles to pass to the mouth, or possibly hollow tubes on each tentacle were themselves individual mouths connected to the gut.

I do think it's aptly named, appearing as something you might see while on acid, but being only 1-2 inches long, it's not quite as terrifying as some of my other favorite specimens from the Cambrian explosion. I think I like it so much because I'm just tickled by the image of a couple paleontologists looking at this fossil and going "which part is the head and which is the butt?" and having that be an entire topic of research.

[project-rv]

Drawing one of my favorites Cambrian creatures because I didn't see anyone drawing it 😅

I don't know how to draw background, sorry ;-;

[jdawgex]

Holy Cambrian critters!

[strawberrylind]

genderless burger experience!!! (attack for my friends @battry-acid and @merlyybird )