

Fossil Resembling a Cactus Walking On 20 Legs Found In China - japaget
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/03/01/134138005/cactus-walking-on-20-legs-found-in-china?sc=fb&cc=fp

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metageek
Sigh. This article is a little too mystical about the Cambrian Explosion for
my taste. "[W]hen life, for no obvious reason, burst into a crazy display of
weird new fantastic forms"—this sort of thing happens when evolution comes
across a new trick, like triploblasty, or skeletons, or ecommerce. Suddenly
new species appear that use the new trick; and the first players will be much
more varied than the later ones, since the later ones will all be descended
from the species that won out in the first round.

(My layman's hypothesis is that the Cambrian Explosion is an illusion: there
was a lot of diversity before, but it was all soft-bodied species that don't
fossilize. Then some unicellular life form evolved that made use of calcium,
perhaps as a shell to resist predators. It wasn't a perfect defense, so the
predators managed to eat _some_ of them, which got calcium into the food
chain. This triggered an arms race, as predators evolved weapons, and prey
evolved shells and skeletons. Suddenly all the existing lineages were evolving
into species that could appear in the fossil record.)

Edit: here's a Wikipedia article that says I'm not the first to think of this:
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Small_shelly_...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Small_shelly_fauna)

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JoeAltmaier
Lots of body forms Did survive to the present day. We usually think of mammals
when we say "animal" which are all similar. But consider worms, bugs (legs AND
wings), nematodes, sponges, spiders (legs And mouth parts), octopi, fish,
seahorses.

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alphaoverlord
Are they really deciding function by form?

I honestly can't tell how the plant/animal moves from a static picture, and
even if its an animal, it could be a stationary animal. IE. Coral, sponge,
things of that nature.

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john2x
What about starfish and sea urchins?

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jdp23
Great pictures of other lobopodians too!

We have a sculpture of Hallucigenia in our living room, a survivor of a
Burning Man art exhibit :-)

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gort
The paper is:

Jianni Liu, _et al_ (2011) An armoured Cambrian lobopodian from China with
arthropod-like appendages. _Nature_ 470(7335): 526-530 (doi:
10.1038/nature09704)

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7335/full/nature0...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7335/full/nature09704.html)

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metageek
Interesting details at Wikipedia, along with some links to other Lobopodia:

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Diania>

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sigzero
That sounds like something out of H.P. Lovecraft. Maybe the old ones are real.

