#hallucigenia

https://higuchiyuko.tokyo/collections/hinemizushima

tortoisequeef@tortoisequeef

what if the cambrian period was in hazbin hotel

Hallucigenia 🪱 this is next month's (September 2025) patreon print! It'll be a fine art print so the details will come through nicely! For more than 500 million years life on Earth has been experimenting, and everyday I'm growing in my awe and excitement about that and about all of the creatures that have existed.

Artwork by Petr Modlitba

just some kids playing around underneath the waves

Animals from left to right: aegirocassis, opabinia, marella, burgessia, nectocaris x2, wiwaxia x2, anomalocaris, omniden, hallucigenia & pikaia

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.