#cambrian

ANOMALOCARIS STICKERS - NOW AVAILABLE

I love Paleozoic sea critters, so I decided to make a cute sticker design of an anomalocaris, based on an old illustration I did. 🦐✨

Stickers are printed on durable, waterproof, and scratch-resistant vinyl. Can be used for your laptop, water bottle, or notebook.

You can check them out on my Etsy.

Part 9

Burgessomedusa Phasmiformis (but Pokémon)

I am having a terrible day so I made a little doodle of the Cambrian jellyfish my next silly little video is going to be about.

Described as looking like a haunted victorian lampshade, Ghost typing was inevitable (and deeefinitely not because I love ghost types). Burgessomedusa lived around 505 mya, predating land on life.

I retained the overall shape that it would have had in life, though I don't think I hit anywhere near the 90 short tentacles it would have irl.

At the time of writing this it is the oldest known jellyfish and is known from the Burgess Shale deposits, specifically the Raymond Quary.

I opted to go for a light colour that's partially transparent, inspired by moon jellies because I love them, and to my knowledge there's no information as to what colour they would have been.

Burgessomedusa was likely a benthic (near ocean floor) predator, and grew to about 20 cm, which doesn't sound super big, but opabinia is about 7cm, hallucigenia is around 5.5cm, and pikaia— one of the earliest members of chordata and thus ancestor to you, me, the dog, your neighbour's cow— hit only about 4cm. Burgessomedusa wasn't the biggest creature alive back then, but it's far from being tiny compared to many organisms around it.

Funny story, I got a little too excited reading through articles and accidentally stumbled onto a creationist site that claimed burgessomedusa disproved jellyfish evolved from non cniderians (group jellyfish are in), which is just baffling because no. That's not what that proves, it just proves that jellyfish are old as fuck. It was otherwise in line with what other articles (and the studies I read) were saying up until that point so it just took me out.

Part 8