Burgess Shale - Tumblr Posts
I recognize those spines! That’s not an extraterrestrial, that’s a (descendant of a) hallucigenia.
aparently in the latest fantastic 4 comics johnny storm has been in a relationship with an alien, and that would be pretty standard affair for marvel heroes, right.
except someone at marvel with fucking balls of steel and the biggest brain in the known universe made the alien look... actually alien
this is the greatest thing ive seen in my life, is almost enough to make me want to read the comic
Thinking about it, the squishiness makes perfect sense, particularly given that fossils of the claws (frontal apendages) and mouthparts (oral cones) were the first parts of the critter to be discovered and (mis)identified...
Speaking of which, I'm sure you know this already but I just think it's cool, the reason for the name Anomalocaris is because it was named for the frontal apendage (grasping claw thing) which was originally thought to be the body of a weird shrimp-like creature, hence the meaning of the latin name, 'weird shrimp' (or more accurately, 'abnormal shrimp' or 'unlike other shrimps')...
If you didn't know, when people call anomalocaris a shrimp It's just jokey! Shrimp are arthropods like insects and arachnids. Anomalocarids were more like arthropod adjacent or according to some models part of a group ancestral to proper arthropods.
Velvet worms are the only modern example of anything possibly related to them, and anomalocaris would have had the same soft worm-like anatomy. YES even educational materials and scientific diagrams give it a jointed hard exoskeleton but yes this is just wrong and we actually knew it was wrong for most of the time we've known about them. They were squishy like a big caterpillar!
holy SHIT please read the whole thread and many more of these images right here, this artist put together an updated Opabinia reconstruction where every single one of these minute details (except coloration, obviously) are fully sourced making this most likely the first depiction factoring in 100% of current knowledge about it. Even I didn’t know it had little feet like a velvet worm and could have walked around on them! I never knew exactly how the trunk is oriented or how many “teeth” it is! I especially didn’t know the mouth was that weird! And I kind of assumed this since it’s a lobopod and all, but the whole animal was soft and squishy except for the eyes and the teeth. It did not have armor plates or a jointed exoskeleton like a lot of people portray. This also means all five of the eyes would have been able to bend and look around independently! The eye structure in fossils also indicates that they would have PSEUDOPUPILS! That’s the pupil-like dot in the eyes of insects like mantises!