One of Evolution’s Oddest Creatures Finds a Fossilized Family Member
The New York Times
Opabinia, which swam the seas of Earth’s Cambrian era some 500 million years ago, was not just a one hit wonder.
Of all the strange creatures unearthed from the Burgess Shale — a cache of remarkable Cambrian fossils deposited in the Canadian Rockies — none has been quite as transfixing as Opabinia. And for good reason — with five compound eyes and a trunk-like nozzle that ended in a claw, Opabinia seems otherworldly, like something imagined in a science fiction novel, rather than a swimmer in Earth’s oceans some 500 millions years ago.
In “Wonderful Life,” his best-selling opus on the Burgess Shale, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould labeled Opabinia as a “weird wonder,” and said it belonged among the pantheon of evolutionary icons like Archaeopteryx, Tyrannosaurus rex and archaic human ancestors.
However, Opabinia has remained shrouded in evolutionary mystery because of a frustrating lack of fossils. The bulk of Opabinia specimens were collected more than a century ago and the creature has never been found outside of the Burgess Shale.
