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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13476 Posts |
 Posted - 02/23/2011 : 12:43:37
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Well, no. But it is a cambrian example of a ver early arthropod, and a very cool one at that!
Meet Diania the walking cactus, an early cousin of life’s great winners
Around 520 million years ago, a walking cactus roamed the Earth. Its body had nine segments, each bearing a pair of armour-plated legs, covered in thorns. It was an animal, but one that looked more like the concoction of a bad fantasy artist. Jianni Liu from Northwest University in Xi’an discovered this bundle of spines and named it Diania cactiformis – the “walking cactus from Yunnan”. And she thinks that it sits at the roots of the most successful group of animals on the planet.
If Liu is right, Diania is one of the earliest relatives of the arthropods – the group that includes insects, spiders, crabs, and more. These species all share a segmented body, a hard external skeleton and jointed legs. They are life’s winners, the most diverse of all animal groups.
To understand what made them so special, we need to look at where they came from. “Delving around the roots of arthropods might help us understand drivers of their current huge biodiversity,” says Michael Benton from the University of Bristol. For a start, how did they evolve from soft-bodied worm-like creatures into the armoured, legged animals we know today? Diania might help to provide some answers. If Liu is right, it was an animal that was “close to the point of becoming a true arthropod”... |
 ...To understand what made them so special, we need to look at where they came from. “Delving around the roots of arthropods might help us understand drivers of their current huge biodiversity,” says Michael Benton from the University of Bristol. For a start, how did they evolve from soft-bodied worm-like creatures into the armoured, legged animals we know today? Diania might help to provide some answers. If Liu is right, it was an animal that was “close to the point of becoming a true arthropod”.
Liu found several specimens of Diania in a famous fossil site at Chengjiang, China. The fossils have spent half a billion years underground, but three of them are still beautifully preserved... |
Read on!!!
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Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 02/23/2011 : 14:07:12 [Permalink]
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Excellent article; fascinating animal!
Evolution is wonderful and wonderfully sloppy -- a drunken Santa passing out gifts to the paleonerds. But how great would it be to have a couple of these in an aquarium, eh?
I have long speculated that the so-called "Cambrian Explosion" was the direct result of the formation of chitin; armour for many of the soft-bodied creatures of the Precambrian. With this hard protection, they became more easily fossilized, therefore discoverable by said nerds. Unfortunately we will never know of the amazing creatures of the Precambrian that did not develope chitin, although we have some trace fossils such as worm holes and tracks.
Thanks for the read!
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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A walking cactus?
