Credit...Franz Anthony
The Trilobites column at the New York Times has a story about Opabinia, an enigmatic animal from the Burgess Shale. Stephen Pates, a paleotologist, discovered a strange animal in the collections at the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas in 2017. The animal was classified as a radiodont, like Anomalocaris, but he was fairly certain it wasn't. In a paper recently published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, this new animal is described as a close relative of Opabinia, which until now was the only opabiniid known. The new animal is named Utaurora comosa and was found in the Wheeler Shale Formation in Utah.
Of all the strange creatures unearthed from the Burgess Shale — a cache of remarkable Cambrian fossils deposited in the Canadian Rockies — none has been quite as transfixing as Opabinia. And for good reason — with five compound eyes and a trunk-like nozzle that ended in a claw, Opabinia seems otherworldly, like something imagined in a science fiction novel, rather than a swimmer in Earth’s oceans some 500 millions years ago.
In “Wonderful Life,” his best-selling opus on the Burgess Shale, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould labeled Opabinia as a “weird wonder,” and said it belonged among the pantheon of evolutionary icons like Archaeopteryx, Tyrannosaurus rex and archaic human ancestors.
However, Opabinia has remained shrouded in evolutionary mystery because of a frustrating lack of fossils. The bulk of Opabinia specimens were collected more than a century ago and the creature has never been found outside of the Burgess Shale.