Cambrian Explosion: Hallucigenia's relative (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 30, 2015, 15:46 (3216 days ago) @ David Turell

A worm just as weird with spikes: -http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150629152437.htm-" The Chinese Collins' Monster had a soft and squishy body, six pairs of feather-like front legs, and nine pairs of rear legs ending in claws. Since the clawed rear legs were not well-suited for walking along the muddy ocean floor, it is likely that Collinsium eked out an existence by clinging onto sponges or other hard substances by its back claws, while sieving out its food with its feathery front legs. Some modern animals, including bamboo shrimp, feed in a similar way, capturing passing nutrients with their fan-like forearms.-"The Chinese Collins' Monster resembles Hallucigenia, another otherworldly Cambrian fossil, albeit one which has been the subject of much more study.-"'Both creatures are lobopodians, or legged worms, but the Collins' Monster sort of looks like Hallucigenia on steroids," said Ortega-Hernández. "It had much heavier armour protecting its body, with up to five pointy spines per pair of legs, as opposed to Hallucigenia's two. Unlike Hallucigenia, the limbs at the front of Collins' Monster's body were also covered with fine brushes or bristles that were used for a specialised type of feeding from the water column."-"The spines along Collinsium's back had a cone-in-cone construction, similar to Russian nesting dolls. This same construction has also been observed in the closely-related Hallucigenia and the claws in the legs of velvet worms, making both Collinsium and Hallucigenia distant ancestors of modern onychophorans. According to Ortega-Hernández, "There are at least four more species with close family ties to the Collins' Monster, which collectively form a group known as Luolishaniidae. Fossils of these creatures are hard to come by and mostly fragmentary, so the discovery of Collinsium greatly improves our understanding of these bizarre organisms.'"-Comment: One of the objections to the term Cambrian Explosion is that precursors were soft bodies and therefore did not make fossils, giving the appearance of an evolutionary 'explosion'. But the soft-bodied parts of this fossil are well preserved and there now have been many recent findings of the soft-bodied fossils at an earlier age to remove the objection. As time passes and discoveries are made, the explosion is really an explosion, and is still unexplained as a chance event.