Scientists believe that they have found one of the world’s strangest creatures.
The creature is known as a Hallucigenia. It has taken scientist more than four decades of studying fossilised imprints to determine what the creature looked like and where it fitted into our ecosystem.
Hallucigenia, named because of its dream-like appearance, was around about 542 million years ago.
Scientists were so thrown by the Hallucigenia that when its small fossils were first analysed 40 years ago that they thought its front end was its back end, and its top was its bottom.
They even thought it was an evolutionary one-off that had left no descendants alive today.
However, scientists have shown that it is the ancestor of a small group of worm-like creatures with short, stubby legs that can be found today, living in the undergrowth of tropical forests.
Article written by Editor
5 Responses
weird and cool
weird fossil right
cool
gross
Wish I could see it