Great Fossil Faunas, III: The Burgess Shale

You have to love an animal named Hallucigenia, an animal so strange that paleontologists have flipped the original reconstruction of the animal (lower picture, tottering on stiff spines) upside-down (upper picture, with the spines on the back).

Hallucigenia is only one of a menagerie of odd animals known from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale of British Columbia. It keeps company with the five-eyed Opabinia, skeletal trilobite-like Marella, and Wiwaxia, a strange enough animal with a truly weird name.

The discovery of the Burgess Shale fauna was another paradigm-breaker. This fauna represented a virtual explosion of body plans early in the history of multicellular life, some of which were culled as experiments in evolutionary design, others that can be traced to groups that left descendents.

new Hallucigenia pic copyright 2003 by Karen Carr

For more information on the Burgess Shale animals, click on today's blog title.