Fossil Resembling a Cactus Walking On 20 Legs Found In China

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_...

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.

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.

Great pictures of other lobopodians too!

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

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...

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

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

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