OPABINIA
Opabinia is certainly a contender for one of the most bizarre animals to ever have existed. It lived and died in the Cambrian period and first appeared around 500 million years ago around the end of the “Cambrian Explosion” where Earth saw a rapid increase of the diversity of life. Like may of its Cambrian counterparts, Opabinia was first discovered in the Burgess Shale in Canada by Charles Walcott. Walcott in fact collected 9 complete specimens of the animal, and it should be noted that only 20 complete specimens have ever been found.
Not only was the number of eyes unusual, but also the trunk-like feature or proboscis that was attached to the head. At the end of the proboscis was a pod with grasping spines that was probably used to pick up food and pass it under its head to its mouth. This feature suggest the animal lived just above the sea floor where it could use its trunk to dig under the soft seabed to look for food. Opabinia could reach up to 8cm long, its proboscis or trunk was a third of its body size alone.
With five eyes and a trunk like feature, Opabinia seems completely alien-like to us today, yet while swimming around in the Cambrian oceans with the likes go Hallucigenia and Anomoalocaris, it may not have seemed very unusual. On either side of its head were a pair of eyes, then a single eye in the centre of its head. The position of the eyes suggests that Opabinia’s vision would’ve been very basic, probably only able to distinguish moving shapes and shades of light and dark.
Despite its appearance, Opabinia was a soft bodied creature rather than having a hard exoskeleton, its segmented lobes appear to be soft as they can be distorted during the fossilisation process. Fossils have also been found that contain very delicate imprints of internal organs.
It certainly is hard to imagine that creatures like this existed on Earth half a billion years ago, when Opabinia was reconstructed and presented in 1972, it was met with a room full of laughter!