I had a lot of fun with those Permian drawings, so I decided to do another quick set of designs for my red bubble! Link will be in a reblog. If you’d like other flags or flag combos, just ask!
[ID: Several versions of the same drawing, showing two cartoony Opabinia facing each other. They are aquatic arthropods with segmented bodies with fin-like appendages, five eyes, and a single long facial appendage with a grasper at the end. The two are forming a heart shape with their curved facial appendages. Cursive text above them reads, “Gaymbrian Period.” In each image, the animals’ segments are colored with the colors of a different pride flag. In the first, one is the color of the original 9-stripe gay flag, while the other is trans flag colors. There are also two in gay flag colors, two in pan colors, two in bi colors, and two in lesbian colors. End ID.]
Masks are probably still going to be part of our daily life for a while. So why not wear a nice one! This one has over 20 critters from the Cambrian fitted into a pattern.
Mask has resizable ear loops and a nose wire for a perfect fit. You can even insert a filter for better protection.
Today I would like to offer free(for personal/non-commercial use) natural history coloring pages. This one’s based on the Cambrian explosion. Let me know what you think. Top has gray background to help if you only want to color the critters, bottom has white background if you want to choose the color there.
If you color one, please tag me and I will reblog it.
What: Louisella is a worm-type organism from the Burgess Shale formation in the Canadian Rockies of BC. This organism was about 12 inches (~30 centimeters) long, with a proboscis at its anterior end that could be inverted into the body or extruded. In the images above it is inverted into the body in the fossil specimen, but shown at its full extended length in the reconstruction. This structure was ringed by a series of spines with shorter and more robust spikes on the end of the proboscis. These structures would rub past one another as the animal extended and retracted its proboscis, allowing it to ‘chew’ its food. The rows of short fringes on one surface of Louisella are thought to possible have been the animal’s gills. This worm has been reconstructed as a burrowing and carnivorous creature, and due to the grinding capability afforded to it by its proboscis, it likely ate animals of a relatively large size.
Louisella is currently held as a stem fossil on the lineage leading to the Priapulida worms, also known as the 'Penis worms’. I swear I am not making that up. These worms are very rare even today, with less than 20 living species known. They, like their ancient relative, are burrowing creatures which hunt other invertebrates. Fossils of priapulid worms are also rare, only a handful of Louisella specimens are known. What is far more common though are their distinctive shaped burrows, which are sort of an interlocking L-shape. The appearance of this type of burrows is one of the biostratigraphic markers of the start of the Cambrian period.
Chengjiang Biota - the dawn of the vertebrates, by Brian Choo:
“Strange creatures swarm in shallow sea off the northern fringes of the Gondwanan supercontinent. In the unimaginably distant future, this ancient seabed will be exposed as the Maotianshan Shale on the lush flanks of scenic hills in eastern Yunnan (Chengjiang, Jinning and Anning Counties), China. The fossils of the Maotianshan, collectively called the Chengjiang Biota, give a priceless glimpse into the Cambrian Explosion, the comparatively sudden appearances of a bewildering diversity of animal body forms that herald the arrival of the Phanerozoic. It represents one of a handful of Cambrian localities in the world, along with the Burgess Shale of Canada and Sirius Passet of Greenland, to feature extensive soft tissue preservation. The Chengjiang Biota currently includes well over 100 identified species, including creatures close to the ancestry of the vertebrate lineage.”
#RealFossilHunter Tour – Part 4: Fossil Hunter Lottie meets Cambrian critter expert Dr Allison Daley
The incredible evolutionary explosion of weird and wonderful animals 500 million years ago has a special, trowelblazer-tastic history — have you heard of Helen, Helena and Mary Vaux Walcott, the Burgess Shale trowelblazers? If not, read this post! And that trowelblazing tradition continues to this day — which is why Fossil Hunter Lottie was just a tad excited to make her way to the University of Oxford and sound the day with Dr Allison Daley and learn all about her Cambrian Critters…
Yuyuanozoonis a large vetulicolian, with all the taxonomic confusion that that taxonomic assignment implies. The only known specimen is from an individual 20 cm long. It consisted of a large, fusiform anterior region and a relatively short and simple segmented ‘tail’. Like all vetulicolians, it was blind and lacked any obvious external structures aside from gill slits, segmentation, and a mouth. As it had only a small, fairly cylindrical tail and lacked keels that might serve to have stabilized it, Yuyuanozoonwas probably a poor swimmer. Like all vetulicolians, Yuyuanozoonexhibited a variety of confusing traits. Besides the arthropod-like segmented cuticle, Yuyuanozoonappears to have an atrium, an internal cavity that surrounds the pharynx in tunicates. This trait makes Yuyuanzoonone of the most convincingly deuterostome-like, or even tunicate-like, vetulicolians.
Etymology: “Little Skeem,” after the Skeem family who found the type specimen
Age and Location: Middle Cambrian of Utah
Classification:Eukarya: Opisthokonta: Metazoa: Eumetazoa: Bilateria: incertae sedis
Ah, the Cambrian explosion. We’ll be spending a lot of time here. Like Pikaia,which I wrote about yesterday,Skeemellais a debated bilaterian that may be close to the ancestry of chordates. It’s a possible member of the enigmatic Vetulicolia, a clade of exoskeleton-bearing animals that consist of a boxy anterior region and a segmented tail, which might be deuterostomes, and specifically seem to be stem-group tunicates. Vetulicolians, including Skeemella, were blind and probably poor swimmers that kept close to the seafloor. Skeemella, however, has a strikingly longer “tail” than any other vetulicolian, and it apparently lacks gill slits, which are otherwise prominent in many vetulicolians. Furthermore, it has a telson and a clearly segmented anterior body. By and large Skeemellaseems more arthropod-like than any other vetulicolian, though it’s totally unclear what kind of arthropod it could be. Vetulicolians, Skeemellain particular, also resemble the microscopic mud dragons (Kinorhyncha), a group somewhat related to arthropods, within the clade Ecdysozoa. At 14 cm long, Skeemellawas large for a Cambrian animal.
IsSkeemellaa vetulicolian? It’s hard to tell, given that only one specimen is known. It certainly resembles ecdysozoans more than other vetulicolians do, which raises the possibility that it’s an ecdysozoan that converged on vetulicolians. Alternatively, it could be a vetulicolian that converged on ecdysozoans, or it could be convergent on both, or it could be proof that vetulicolians were specialized, deuterostome-like ecdysozoans.
Sources:
Aldridge RJ., Hou X-G., Siveter DJ., Siveter DJ., Gabbott SE. 2007. the Systematics and Phylogenetic Relationships of Vetulicolians. Palaeontology 50:131–168.
Briggs DEG., Lieberman BS., Halgedahl SL., Jarrard RD. 2005. A new metazoan from the middle Cambrian of Utah and the nature of the Vetulicolia. Palaeontology 48:681–686.
García-Bellido DC., Lee MSY., Edgecombe GD., Jago JB., Gehling JG., Paterson JR. 2014. A new vetulicolian from Australia and its bearing on the chordate affinities of an enigmatic Cambrian group. BMC evolutionary biology 14:214.
Lieberman BS. 2008. The Cambrian radiation of bilaterians: Evolutionary origins and palaeontological emergence; earth history change and biotic factors. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 258:180–188.
Shu D-G., Conway Morris S., Zhang Z-F., Han J. 2010. The earliest history of the deuterostomes: the importance of the Chengjiang Fossil-Lagerstatte. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 277:165–174.
Cause Prehistory isn’t just about dinosaurs, I made a poster with every ‘Dinovember Without Dinosaurs’ illustrations that I’ve been drawing during last month. Hope you like it!
Fun Fact: Opabinia was about the size of a mouse and had 5 eye stalks. Several specimens were found in the famous Burgess Shale.
*During the Cambiran period, the Earth’s geography was vastly different from today’s (this was even before Pangaea!). The ancient land mass that later became North America is called Laurentia. You can see a map of Cambrian Earth here.
