The bizarre creature, named Hallucigenia, emerged during the Cambrian Explosion, a period of rapid evolutionary development starting about half a billion years ago, when most major animal groups first emerge in the fossil record.
Its fossil was first found in the 1970s in the Burgess Shales, but scientists have now discovered they had it both backwards and upside down. What researchers initially thought were legs have turned out to be spines. It’s head had also been mistaken for its tail.
Right side up and right way round, Hallucigenia still looks pretty strange: it had pairs of lengthy spines along its back, seven pairs of legs ending in claws, and three pairs of tentacles along its neck.
The animals were between 10 and 50 millimetres in length and lived on the floor of the Cambrian oceans.
For more information: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/11696453/Bizarre-lobster-ancestor-roamed-ocean-500-million-years-ago.html
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