One of only a tiny handful of animals to ever evolve a trunk. Also, now that I think about it, it makes complete sense for the structures on the underside to be legs and for Opabinnia to be a scuttling animal rather than a primary swimmer. Given the placement of the eyes, Opabinnia would have no defense against any attacks from below if it was swimming. You would expect swimmers to have forward- or side-facing eyes like Radiodonts in order to better locate and track prey. Having five eyes all placed upwards makes little sense for a swimmer.
Thank you! It really means a lot. The channel in terms of views and revenue has been down for a good bit, and it's harder to work on and get longer videos out when I'm down at uni, so the last few weeks have been more stressful in that regard. I'll keep it up though. Stay tuned for more! :)
Off Topic: I don't recall many ancient fossilized ocean parasites beign documented like some isopods, lampreys, and passively parasitic like the pilot fish. I wonder what examples we have of parasitic species as these seem a fairly common survival strategy. When did complex large-ish marine parasites start to appear in the fossile record, and what were they? Are there features on some described species mistaken as part of an animal that could have been parasites similar the very common worm we see attached to the eyes of Greenland Sharks?
I always wondered if he was directly feeding through his proboscis or whether he had a separate mouth and used the proboscis like an elephant. Thank you very much!
The Cambrian is so damn weird I’m glad we get such a good insight into it due to animals like the Opabinia. It’s discovery must’ve really changed the scientific communities views.
I really liked the picture where it was rendered like a shrimp, I kind of had a hard time grasping it only being ~5 cm long, I rather inagined 20-30 cm. If it was that small being shrimp-ishly semi-tranlucent makes a lot of sense to me.
Our home in upstate NY Mohawk Valley is, like all the area, a hidden Cambrian and Ordovician fossil bed to a point we do have fossils in our backyard since the house was built off an untouched lot near the Mohawk River in 1990. Biggest rock I removed was close to 50 pounds, we drilled it open and found it packed with micro fossils, biggest being the size of a quarter.
5:59 It's stuff like this that makes me think we shouldn't base classifications on arbitrary modern groupings. Because we then have to bend over backwards or shoehorn in extinct lineages in order to stick them in our modern groups. This is especially apparent with "reptiles" as it consists of several only distantly related groupings (lizards+snakes, turtles, crocodiles) and so when we have a group that doesn't neatly fit into that group we have to create "pesudotaxon" or "close-enoughasauride" because that species doesn't happen to look like what we define as a reptile.
I love the story behind it. When a reconstruction of the creature was displayed at a scientific meeting in the 70’s, many people started laughing because it’s just THAT weird-looking 😂
The five eye thing isn’t even what I find strange about them (a lot of living arthropods have five eyes, like bees, mantises and cicadas). It’s their mouth and absence of apparent limbs. Those are unusual features that are extremely rare (nonexistent) in animals today. Of course they probably did have limbs.
