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Five Eyes and Nose Arms - Freaks of the Cambrian Explosion

      Opabinia was a Cambrian animal with five eyes.  Apart from the obvious, what makes five eyes so strange is that it violates the principle of bilateral symmetry – something which characterizes all animal life from worms to insects to humans, ever since we split with jellyfish and sponges.  Opabinia also had a long nose.  On the end of its nose was a gripper.  The gripper was comprised of spines that functioned sort of like fingers or pinchers.[1]  Opabinia's body was segmented into parts.  In this manner, it was like an arthropod, only without antennae,[2] and arthropods are part of the larger group bilateria.  Since it lacks bilateral symmetry with regard to its eyes yet otherwise seems to be a bilaterian, it remains something of an anomaly.

      Another Cambrian creature that also may have had more than two eyes was Myoscolex.  It is notoriously hard to categorize this creature.  Myoscolex had a muscular trunk like an arthropod, which would make it family with lobsters and insects, but it lacked head appendages.  It had dorso-ventral differentiation and gonads, like the primitive chordates humans later came from.  Yet unlike chordates, it had legs coming out of its belly.  In this, it was like the polychaete worms, which were not related to chordates or arthropods.  Its body wall and intestines resembled that of still another group, the nemathelmintha, which are entirely unrelated to chordates.  Dzik concludes Myoscolex was an early annelid worm at the base of the split between arthropods and chordate-like forms.[3]  If true, this would mean that Myoscolex is not so much a fossil frankenstein as it is a witness to just how fast evolution can happen.  If a creature like this retained so many characters of so many different phyla as late as the Cambrian, it means it is near the base of the divergence of the phyla, and is therefore a testimony to the fact that the split between the major phyla happened not much earlier than the Cambrian – thus confirming the reality of rapid evolution during the Cambrian Explosion.

      This is also exemplified in the primitive chordate Nectocaris.  Simonetta believed Nectocaris was a chordate.[4]  But it had a segmented body, crustacean-like eyes, appendages from the head, and a carapace-like shield on the head – traits more akin with arthropods than chordates.[5]  Thus, either Nectocaris is a fossil frankenstein, or else it is an intermediate form so close to the base of the divergence of arthropods and chordates that it confirms the reality of rapid evolution in the Cambrian Explosion. 

            These Cambrian animals, which exemplify traits of multiple phyla, even to the extent that they cannot be classified, are a testimony to the extraordinarily rapid, diverse, and in some cases frankensteinish pattern of evolutionary activity during the Cambrian Explosion.

      One of the freaks to come out of the Cambrian Explosion was a spiny little animal that was every bit as weird as its unique name – Wiwaxia.  The list of candidates for what this thing might be runs the gamut from slug to worm to mollusk.  Wiwaxia's appearance was that of an underwater porcupine.  It had spines around the upper side of its body.  Morris proposed that Wiwaxia was slug-like.[6]  Gould, for his part, believed Wiwaxia was most closely affiliated with mollusks.[7]  Morris asserted that it bore resemblance to a slug named Halkieriid, but Gould questioned him based on the absence of legs on Wiwaxia and on Halkieriid's armored plates.[8]  Butterfield asserted that the 520 million year old creature was a worm of sorts, but more like an earthworm, because its sclerites were of a similar nature to the hair-like quills of earthworms.[9]  But the presence of sclerites might also indicate its kinship with Chancelloria, another scleritome organism which sat on the bottom of the sea something like a mollusk.[10]  Wiwaxia also resembles the polychaetes, which are segmented marine worms with appendages on each segment sort of like centipedes except the appendages are more like clumps of stiff hair than like legs. 

            Perhaps the reason why Wiwaxia is so hard to classify is because it takes its DNA from all of the above.  Maybe some heavenly entities were cutting and splicing DNA from slugs, worms, mollusks, and polychaetes – resulting in the frankenstein fossil Wiwaxia.  Angels might have done this for a joke, to laugh at the monsters that resulted from their lust.  As Martin said, "Wiwaxia, Opabinia, and Amiskwia look like concoctions made for a children's cartoon series."[11]

            Another oddball to come out of the Cambrian Explosion is the strange conical mollusk-type creature Haplophrentis.  This animal was a shelled bottom dweller without legs, much like mollusks, but what made it unusual was its two appendages coming from the anterior, called "helens."  These appendages evidently functioned like oars, rowing the animal along in the mud.[12]  Appendages from the head were common among Cambrian arthropods, such as trilobites and the various arachnomorphs, but were atypical of bottom dwelling shelled fauna.  This crossover trait is plausible evidence for angelic interference, insofar as an unknown intelligence may have copied from arthropods the DNA sequence for head appendages and pasted it into the genome of the otherwise mollusk-like Haplophrentis. Click to read more about fossil frankensteins.

The creationist narrative in Genesis 1 is contradicted by many ancient Christian texts.  Instead of an Almighty Creator God, ancient Christian texts espouse that the universe is born from blind arrogance and stupidity.  The angels caused evolution to occur from species to species.  There are many gods, (or aliens?), and the Christian God is just one among them.  Satan the Devil writes scripture, and thus the Bible was polluted with Genesis 1.  Archaeology and modern scholarship demonstrate that Genesis is indeed corrupted.  Cavemen walk with Adam and Eve.  Esoteric prophecies reveal the coming of Christ, and also reveal the dark forces that govern the cosmos.  Such are the ancient Christian writings.

Science vindicates the truth of these ideas.  Evolution often happens too fast for Darwin’s theory.  Gaps in the fossil record indicate that some kind of unnatural force acts together with natural selection.  Astrobiology reveals that intelligent life probably evolved long before us.  The fossil record reveals strange clues that aliens abducted species and transported them across oceans, and that DNA from diverse lineages was combined to spawn hybrid species.  Evidently, aliens influence evolution, and they are the gods of the world’s religions. 

This is not fiction.  All these facts are thoroughly documented in the links above.



[1] Briggs, Derek E G; Erwin, Douglas H; Collier, Frederick J; Clark, Chip.  The Fossils of the Burgess Shale.  1994, Smithsonian Institution, Washington  DC, p 42

[2] Whittington, H B.  The Enigmatic Animal Opabinia Regalis, Middle Cambrian, Burgess Shale, British Columbia.  1975, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 271(910), p 1-43

[3] Dzik, Jerzy.  Anatomy and Relationships of the Early Cambrian Worm Myoscolex.  2004, Zoologica Scripta, p 32, 56-69

[4] Simonetta, A M.  Is Nectocaris Pteryx a Chordate?  1988, Bolletino di Zoologica 55, p 63-68

[5] Briggs, Derek E G; Erwin, Douglas H; Collier, Frederick J; Clark, Chip.  The Fossils of the Burgess Shale.  1994, Smithsonian Institution, Washington  DC, p 209

[6] Morris, Simon Conway.  The Middle Cambrian Metazoan Wiwaxia Corrugata (Matthew) from the Burgess Shale and Ogygopsis Shale, British Columbia, Canada.  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B 307, p 507-582

[7] Gould, Stephen J.  Wonderful Life:  The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.  1989, W W Norton & Company, NY, 

[8] Morris, Simon Conway; Gould, Stephen J.  Showdown on the Burgess Shale.  Natural History Magazine, 107 (10), p 48-55.

[9] Butterfield, Nicholas J.  A Reassessment of the Enigmatic Burgess Shale Fossil Wiwaxia Corrugata (Matthew) and Its Relationship to the Polycaete Canadia Spinosa (Walcott).  1990, Paleobiology 16, No 3, p 287-303

[10] Briggs, Derek E G; Erwin, Douglas H; Collier, Frederick J; Clark, Chip.  The Fossils of the Burgess Shale.  1994, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, p 42

[11] Martin, Robert A.  Missing Links:  Evolutionary Concepts & Transitions Through Time.  2004, Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Sudbury, MA, p 112

[12] Briggs, Derek E G; Erwin, Douglas H; Collier, Frederick J; Clark, Chip.  The Fossils of the Burgess Shale.  1994, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, p 113

THIS SECTION:

FOSSIL FRANKENSTEINS