Paleontology and science illustration, and feathering ALL the dinosaurs
Time for some more PBS Eons commission work!
The radiodonts Lyrarapax and Tamisiocaris, from “How Plankton Created A Bizarre Giant of the Seas”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0oKBPZODhM
The rhynchocephalians Sphenotitan, Clevosaurus, and Kawasphenodon, from “When Lizards Took Over the World”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peeX3PKOE_w
During the Cambrian explosion, a time full of incredibly weird-looking evolutionary experiments, Opabinia regalis was one of the weirdest of all – so ridiculous, in fact, that when its anatomy was first revealed at a presentation the audience laughed.
Known from the mid-Cambrian Burgess Shale fossil deposits in Canada, this bizarre creature lived around 508 million years ago and had a body measuring just 4-7cm long (~1.5-2.75″).
It had five stalked eyes on its head, and a long flexible proboscis that resembled a vacuum cleaner hose ending in a pincer-like grasping structure. Its mouth was located on the bottom of its head, behind the base of its proboscis, and the opening pointed backwards forming a U-bend in its digestive tract.
The rest of its segmented body had overlapping swimming lobes and a tail fan, and small triangular structures that may have been legs on its underside.
It was probably a bottom-feeding predator or a detritvore, swimming along above the seafloor using its proboscis to snatch up small soft prey or organic material and passing it up to its mouth.
It also seems to have been a fairly rare member of the Burgess Shale ecosystem, with less than 50 specimens known from the thousands of fossils found there.
For a while Opabinia was thought to represent a completely new phylum, but after further discoveries of similar animals like Anomalocaris it’s now considered to be a “stem-arthropod”, a close evolutionary cousin to modern insects, arachnids, myriapods, and crustaceans. Its exact relationships with other stem-arthropods are still being debated, however, and some studies suggest its closest living relatives may actually be tardigrades.
Thanahita distos, a recently-named species from the mid-Silurian of the UK (~430 mya).
This little lobopodian was very closely related to the famous Cambrian Hallucigenia, but it lived over 70 million years later – giving us the first evidence that these weird worms weren’t just short-lived “evolutionary experiments”, but must have actually been a very successful lineage that thrived for quite a long time.
Measuring around 3.5cm long (1.4″), it had seven pairs of legs tipped with one or two claws each, and at least two pairs of shorter tentacles on its neck. The head region of the only known fossil specimen wasn’t preserved, so it’s unclear exactly what its front end looked like – but it would have probably been quite similar to Hallucigenia with a slender oval head, two simple eyes, and a small round mouth ringed by tiny teeth.
Unlike its spiky relative, however, Thanahita’s back was covered in rows of numerous small raised soft-tissue “tufts”. I’ve reconstructed it here with them brightly warning colored, mimicking stinging coral polyps.
Trilobites are common and recognizable fossils, found around the world from the Early Cambrian to the Late Permian (521-250 mya), and ranging in size from 1mm to 72cm (0.03″ – 2′4″). They were some of the first organisms on Earth with complex eyes, and some groups also developed ornamentation like spines, horns, and tridents. The image above depicts a particularly elaborate genus known as Dicranurus.
Occasionally fossils have been found showing fine details of trilobite anatomy like antennae, legs, gills, and digestive organs, and we’ve even recently discovered their eggs.
And yet we don’t really know where they came from. Much like the pterosaurs we started the month off with, trilobites appear suddenly in the fossil record with no intermediate or ancestral forms to definitively link them to other groups. We know they were definitely arthropods, but which arthropods they were most closely related to is still uncertain.
They might be related to the chelicerates (arachnids, horseshoe crabs, and eurypterids), or they might be part of the mandibulates (crustaceans, insects, and myriapods). But the exact relationships of these major arthropod groups are still in dispute, too, and phylogenetic results can vary wildly depending on whether trilobites are included in the analysis or not.
It’s probably going to be some time before any sort of consensus is reached.
