Here's an interesting link:

This may be a type of early molluscan (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4156544.stm) ancestor or relative, but its classification doesn't yet sit well with any known groups. Wonders never cease.

But remember Phil, due to Intelligent Design, passing this link to you may label me an enemy of the state.

John

first impression to me was that it looked like a badly drawn garden slug, but reading the article has confused me so much that it now looked like everything.

So long as it doesn't have eight-fold symmetry and fragments of shoggoth
DNA clinging to it, I think we're safe.

So long as it doesn't have eight-fold symmetry and fragments of shoggoth
DNA clinging to it, I think we're safe.

Shudder!

I particluarly like the quote from Jonathan Todd of the Natural History Museum.

"It is another strange thing from the Cambrian"

Thanks for this chaps, very interesting indeed.

On first impressions it looks very much to me like an anomalocarid. I attach a little comparison diagram to show what I mean, perhaps though this new creature could have been a little more gelatinous than its better known cousins, especially around the claw end. There doesn't seem to be any segmentation on the appendages on the reconstruction, but who knows.

Not sure about this 'shoe-horning' into existing phyla business in the report, or the call to create a new phylum for it (SJ Gould would be proud); should one even expect this very ancient animal to fit a current phylum? I believe that there is a theory that in the early Cambrian phyla as we know them were yet to be established and that many creatures were in the 'melting-pot' between what would later emerge as the mollusca, the arthropoda, chordata etc. Similar confused accusations were once thrown at the near contemporary Anomalocaris, but I think that it is now thought by most researchers to be some form of arthropod. Certainly by the time of the Burgess Shales modern phyla had been set, but perhaps even this new Vetustodermis could have been a descendant of a muddled lineage from an even earlier time?

It'll be very interesting to read the publication if we can track it down.

Very cool indeed. 8-)

But remember Phil, due to Intelligent Design, passing this link to you may label me an enemy of the state.

John,

You ARE an enemy of the state. We just keep it to ourselves on TONMO! :wink:

Phil

You forgot the double-decker bus.

You forgot the double-decker bus.

Yeah c'mon Phil, how can we tell how big it is?

Yeah c'mon Phil, how can we tell how big it is?

Yep.

http://www.tonmo.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=1246&stc=1

SHRIEK!!!

:bugout: :bonk:

Horse Feathers

Well that didn't take long. The Japanese site where I obtained the nautiloid and ammonoid reconstructions from, already has this nice little drawing.