The Splendiferous Zone

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.

COME JOIN THE CIRCUS ♡

With some Reload touch