I could swear I have built all of those in Spore at some point.
Geez, it's like nobody has ever played Spore.
Spore
More spikes is always the correct solution.
Too few phallic animals for that
Did they really look like this or were there big fat blubbery bits that didn’t survive fossilisation
Unlikely for there to be bubbly bits. These are bugs, so we know their shape because their exoskeleton (which is what fossilizes) is their shape. Fish haven't evolved yet
These seem to be illustrations of Burgess Shale organisms, Burgess Shale being renowned for the excellent preservation of soft tissues in its fossils, so the bubbly bits were actually quite well preserved, if maybe a bit squished and deflated.
Thanks. I looked it up.
You saying these are bugs tickles my funny bone imagining a metre long anomalcaris scuttling out from under the fridge, like a scene from a Cronenberg movie.
It was the N64 era of evolution.
First one looks like an urchin with pattern baldness
My first thought was "a brain with blades in it" and now I wonder how different our answers in a Rorschach Test would be...
In my mind the brain blades can extend and retract wolverine style.
Life got pretty boring following the last mass extinction. So many mammals evolved from that mouse which survived that we all have the same basic features from hamsters to humans. So much so that mice are a good experimental model for humans...
okay, but seriously, why did they evolve so differently than modern-day fish? and if we magically reintroduced them, would they be more fit or less fit than modern-day fish?
I am not a biologist or really anyone with any authority on the matter. Just some guy who likes to read and think about all manner of subjects, so I cannot adequately explain anything here, but if you're interested in the why, it really boils down to the simplicity of morphological structures early in the development of life on earth, to more complex as evolution did its thing. That's not to say that evolution has a goal, just that added complexity often means greater advantages. Also, it isn't as though nothing similar to these creatures exist at all today. These basal forms were a prerequisite to the life we see in the oceans (and on land) today.
Definitely stay interested and read more about morphology and evolution in general! Fascinating stuff.
One of the big advances around then was being able to be an effective predator at all. It's likely one of the big causes for the Cambrian explosion was the arms race to not be eaten vs being able to eat your neighbors effectively.
It was a different meta back then. Bottom right is as apex predator
Early devbrach alpha build, balancing and design got implemented through testing.
It's just a phase.
You know what they're doing? Their goddamned best.
Tatakae
Or, just like dinossaurs, we don't know how they actually looked like because fossile records only contain bones.
Other tissues can become fossilized but it's less common as the conditions need to be just right. That's how we know some dinosaurs had feathers and what their skin texture was like.
Cambrian genera like Hallucigenia completely lacked bones and we have numerous fossils of them from deposits of shale. That's how we know what they looked like: tiny Lovecraftian horrors.
we know almost exactly how psittacosaurus looked:
What an unusual shrimp.
OP acting like they got a chance against #1 smh..
#3 still lives today in the form of night terrors, seriously wtf is that thing?
Honestly 2 gets me. Hallucagenia!
