Opabinia
| Opabinia | ||||||||||||
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Opabinia regalis from the Burgess slate |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Lower to Middle Cambrian | ||||||||||||
| 513 to 501 million years | ||||||||||||
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Opabinia | ||||||||||||
| Walcott , 1912 | ||||||||||||
| Art | ||||||||||||
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Opabinia is an extinct animal genus from the Cambrian (513 to 501 mya ) with an unclear systematic position. The only known species, Opabinia regalis , was first described in 1912 by its discoverer Charles Walcott . To date, fewer than 20 well-preserved specimens of Opabinia have been found in the Middle Cambrian archaeological sitein the Burgess Shale in British Columbia , Canada.
anatomy
The animal was segmented and had a soft, uncalcified exoskeleton . The segments were not connected to one another via the outer skin. The body length varied between 40 and 70 millimeters. The head had five fully functional, stalked eyes that gave the wearer a field of vision of almost 360 °. It is believed that these eyes were compound eyes . Another unique feature was the flexible trunk, about a third of the total length of the body. At the end of the trunk was a gripping device. It is believed that the animal was able to catch prey with the help of the proboscis and bring it to the mouth below the proboscis. The mouth, in turn, was pointing backwards at the bottom of the head.
The body consisted of 15 body segments. On these segments there were a number of gills and paired lateral lobe-shaped appendages, which were supposed to serve for locomotion. The lobed appendages of the last three segments showed a different arrangement and shaped the tail of the animal.
Systematics
Opabinia looked like few other animals of its age with its segmented body and the paired lateral lobes. Together with Anomalocaris , Opabinia is therefore also summarized in the class Dinocarida .
literature
- Stephen Jay Gould : Chance Man. The miracle of life as a game of nature . 1993, Hanser , Munich. ISBN 3-446-15951-7
- Graham E. Budd: The morphology of Opabinia regalis and the reconstruction of the arthropod stem group. Lethaia 29, 1-14, Oslo 1996.
