Weekly fossil

Ok Life is still all happening at once (or more to the point NOT happening.. more on all this later) so I figure it's time to get back to blogging a bit. Since I don't have any students to bitch about (classes start jan 7th) what better to do than a fossil. Hallucigenia (which gets my vote for coolest name for any fossil ever) from the famous Precambrian Burgess shale in British Columbia.



It's basically a little wormey looking thing with spikes on one side and noodley appendages on the other. The question is which does it walk on the spikes of the noodley things? When it was first discovered it was reconstructed like this.



Walking on the spikes. Now I ask you, does ANYTHING walk on spikes??..... It's ok I'll wait...... Yeah I didn't think so. So eventually cooler heads prevailed and now.



Ahhh much better. At some point another species was found with substantially smaller spikes that could not possibly have been used as legs. So, it got flipped. Isn't Paleontology just too dang much fun?