#lobopod

A lineup of Cambrian critters at the Naturkunde Museum Stuttgart. If you can’t see most of them: they’re in the glass display at the bottom, with a moveable magnifying glass provided. And then there’s Anomalocaris.

Closer look at Hallucigenia:

So I got a hallucigenia plush

He is my son, my baby

Believe it or not, this walking caltrop is actually an animal called Hallucigenia sparsa. It is a genus of lobopodian, basically a stubby-legged worm. Kind of like this modern day velvet worm:

Hallucigenia was a tiny animal no bigger than 5.5. cm long, as shown in the photo below where the blue line represents 3mm.

It had up to 10 legs, the first 2 or three pairs were slender and featureless but the rest ended in paired claws.

Above the trunk, or main part of the body, are seven pairs of spines or sclerites. The longer end is the head which has an anteroventral (front/bottom) mouth and two simple eyes. The "tail" droops down on the other end.

It was first found in the Burgess Shale in Canada along with all the other crazy soft-bodied Cambrian fauna found there. A second species, H. fortis, was found in the Chengjiang Biota of China (Maotianshan Shale.)

It lived on the sea floor and it is often found in association with the sponge Vauxia, which it may have eaten.

Facivermis

Image 1 by Junnn11 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0