What the Hell is Opabinia?!

[@Sabatuar]

Love those odd lil' five-eyed critters.

[@RaptorChatter]

They're goofy, but just so interesting

[@Jgorb]

i hate them they keep stealing my worm edible material

[@geologyjoerocks]

Cool! I just found this channel; was just yesterday I was teaching my college freshmen about the Avalon and Cambrian Explosions. I wanted to learn more and this helped so much! I'm a Tyoe-1 Diabetic too! Thanks for the support!

[@meg2249]

I wonder why nothing else has attempted the 5 eye strategy? Great now I’m imagining various animals but with 5 eyes, like a cow or dog…

[@dylstarling8649]

Well technically insects do, between the pair of eyes or compound eyes on the top of the head you'll find three simple eyes, pretty sure it's all insects that haves these

[@hayvenforpeace]

Bees, wasps and cicadas do have five eyes.

[@StonedtotheBones13]

I kinda wondered how much it could actually move those eyes. Imagine if they had taken owls' approach to not being able to actually move their eyeballs

[@catherinehubbard1167]

The trunk-like proboscis of opabinia reminds me of the extremely weird “Tully monster,” from much later. That creature too has been argued over ever since it was discovered. The discovery of some details that were interpreted by some as indications of muscle chevrons or possibly a notochord led to the proposal that it could be a chordate, but others disputed the interpretations and the chordate placement. It would be interesting to hear your take on the Tully monster. There are hundreds of specimens, some very well preserved, from just the one location. Love the Diabetesaurus T-shirt. I hope you and your family are well and are able to get the vaccine soon.

[@RaptorChatter]

There's actually been a new paper on Tullimonstrum which I think more or less ends the debate. It's in one of my month in reviews (don't recall which off the top of my head), but essentially there's some traces of organic compounds on the surface of some fossils from Mazon Creek. Essentially invertebrates are more likely to have relict atoms from their covering, and the vertebrates have a different set of atoms likely to show up. They aren't organized in the same way they would have been in the animal, but their presence on one fossil vs. another can show us what the animal was. Using testing to find these atoms researchers found that the Tully monster groups much better with vertebrates from the formation than with invertebrates.

[@zer0nix]

Kinda reminds me of the extending jaw of a dragonfly, or a cross between that and an elephant's trunk. The relatively simple hinge of a dragonfly mouth would imply it is used to catch fast moving prey, whereas a more flexible proboscis is probably used to probe and forage. I'm also loving the diabetesaurus shirt! I rarely notice streamer's shirts but that one is a winner!

[@war_saw]

*the elephantshrimp*

[@StonedtotheBones13]

Danielle's animations of Opabinia are v cute. Audibly awwed at them.

[@mrdudeman29]

Really like the new format!

[@RaptorChatter]

Thanks! It's good to get feedback.

[@christopher3d475]

Punctuated equilibrium is probably a very real thing, as a driver of evolution. Barbara McClintock, who won a Nobel Prize for her work in genetics, found that when under stress (or shock as the term was used), genetic material can re-organize itself. From her Nobel lecture, she wrote, "...several examples from nature implying that rapid reorganizations of genomes may underlie some species formations. Our present knowledge would suggest that these reorganizations originated from some “shock” that forced the genome to restructure itself in order to overcome a threat to its survival."

[@RaptorChatter]

I think there's definitely some middle ground. Looking at some lineages there is still evidence for gradualism, but yes, I agree that punctuated equilibrium is likely more responsible for rapid diversity we after things like extinction events.

[@bonydanza7046]

I guess god had a deviant art OC phase

[@RaptorChatter]

This is my OC, his name is Opie, DON'T STEA. lol

[@bonydanza7046]

@@RaptorChatter Fr tho, that thing looks like something a kid would for one of those draw-your-own monster assignments

[@seanparker4461]

I absolutely LOVE these little videos you make!!

[@MobyTheLion]

opabinia is a cool looking guy :)

[@RaptorChatter]

They were definitely super neat looking.

[@toxiclemon3959]

God just used part of each of his drafts

[@bananeboum]

I LOVE Opabinia. It is my favourite animal ever!

[@TheRealStoku]

Damn, it would've been nice to see the What Happens in the Cambrian stays in the Cambrian T. Great informative videos, as an amateur paleoaficionado I really appreciate your effort to share your knowledge 😁

[@RaptorChatter]

Yeah, I get that. It was actually going to be used for it, but I forgot, and also remembered it was coming up on diabetes awareness month. It will appear in the addendum that we've already filmed though. Literally a week after the video it was already out of date.

[@Zilla-ob9cz]

A literal Pokémon

[@baxtermenziestwice]

Gotta love a real classic

[@K1ng_Squ1dZ]

What the hell is opabana? A masterpiece

[@savvygood]

Looks like Pete’s dragon + a shrimp

[@skeletrocity]

I thought these things were 10 feet long since I was little omg

[@RaptorChatter]

Nope! They were smol. Now, some of the largest arthropods from this time were approaching 10 ft.

[@josieschultz4241]

i bought an opabinia stuffed animal and it came in the mail yesterday and let me tell you this guy is a snuggler

[@RaptorChatter]

Ooh, is the Paleozoic Pals one? I got that too for my kid just before he was born!

[@josieschultz4241]

@@RaptorChatter yes i think that’s where i got it. i want to get their tiktaalik but they’ve been sold out for a long time now

[@RaptorChatter]

@@josieschultz4241 they make great pushes though. I actually pre-ordered their next one which is a large eurypterid

[@Grand_History]

i tried looking up if anomalocaris and opibinia are related to branchiopods like fairy shrimp and sea monkeys, but I`m having a hard time getting a straight answer from google. Do you know if there`s any truth to that, or if it`s just convergent evolution?

[@RokuroCarisu]

Branchiopods are true Crustaceans, which means there is quite a bit of space between them and the Dinocarids. Namely the whole class of the Megacheirans.

[@RaptorChatter]

It's probably a case of convergent evolution more than a close relation. Panarthropoda are characterized by having jointed segments, and it's unclear whether Anomalocaris had these, or of maybe just the arms were segmented, or if there were the same kind of joints at all. So any similarities would probably be convergent rather than a sign of more direct ancestry.

[@Grand_History]

@@RaptorChatter maybe. Probably. But there’s almost a 1:1 ratio in basic anatomical features. I wonder if it’s a testable hypotheses

[@RaptorChatter]

@@Grand_History I think the first step would be to see if there's any genetic work on modern taxa. That way you could try to form an idea of what the first of the clade may have been like

[@Dethmasheen]

They were delicious.

[@humblebumblehomestead]

I bet it hid in the sand and used its trunk as a lure- when buried its eyes would be able to see its prey 😊

[@alexfisher3188]

Didn’t this evolve in to Water bear’s

[@RaptorChatter]

Those are the lobopodans that I mentioned. Waterbears are sister group to the velvet worms, and both are related to lobopodans like Hallucigenia. There was an addendum for this video that described a new fossil which suggests they were closer to arthropods.

[@themidnighttrain3045]

No wonder they died, if I looked like that I would would die to

[@RaptorChatter]

So cruel. But yeah, they probably weren't the cutest Cambrian animals.

[@Aimeedinosaurz]

Oh, Opabinia, I'm so sorry themidnighttrain3045 would even say such a thing.

[@themidnighttrain3045]

Why did I say this?

[@dcarter020809]

it looks like a spore creature

[@thekungachunga4578]

Only thing I knew about Opabinia before watching this was that it added Paleozoic cards to your hand.

[@denishildebrand239]

The Tully monster is a close 2nd....

[@RaptorChatter]

It is definitely up there.

[@Goblue06usaf]

Opabinia, my beloved :)

[@Stegosaurus4000]

Just curious, do you know which Paleontologist first believed Opabinia to be closer related to lobopodians? Was it Whittington?

[@RaptorChatter]

It was mostly Graham Budd from what I saw

[@opabinia5675]

Its me

[@nathanstock7368]

Oh yea, I'm much more interested in learning about creatures from earlier life. Before the dinosaurs.

[@captainrutabeggacrossout8482]

I have a question... For God... WHYYYY WHY WOULD YOU MAKE THIS???

[@hadesdogs4366]

Tacosaurus

[@Jonathan-nb9lc]

How certain are we these guys even existed

[@RaptorChatter]

Pretty certain. There's dozens of fossils of them from the Burgess Shale, and we've progressively found related animals in other areas during the same time period, so it seems like they were around ~510 million years ago.

[@AcrocanthosaurusGuy]

Sad thing is the man evolved so hard he became a microscopic Tardigrade, (Update: I don’t know if it’s outdated or not)

[@RaptorChatter]

Not really. Right now it didn't really evolve into anything, it's lineage just died out. But its closest relatives were probably some of the first arthropods, or animals very close to the arthropods.

[@Trev0r98]

"Adaptive radiation" seems a more plausible explanation to me, to account for creatures like Opabinia. Adaptive radiation posits that we tend to see weird, or innovative morphologies ("body plans"), right after catastrophic extinction events, such as asteroid impacts, enormous basaltic floods/mantle plumes, or nearby supernovae or gamma ray bursts. In other words, natural selection kind of "freaks out" (or overcompensates), to produce body plans as rapidly as possible that will fill the new "snapshot" niche that emerges, right on the heels of every extinction event. These new morophologies invariably turn out to be evolutionary dead ends.

[@RaptorChatter]

Many of them do yes, but since there wasn't a well known extinction event Opabinia more likely represents a radiation from a known group, or near a known group. I actually did an addendum to this video, because a new relative was found, Kylinxia, which helped show what these weird animal probably were

[@Trev0r98]

@@RaptorChatter Extinction events can often be precipitating events - new beginnings. Wild, biogenic "clean slates", in other words: I should have mentioned that there is some research (albeit scant, at this point) that about 570 million years ago - towards the tail end of the Ediacaran - a large gamma ray burst close to earth (within a few light years, perhaps) may have occurred. The radiation penetrated deep into the earth's oceans, right down to the sea beds. Of course the GRB wiped out much of the multicellular life, but it also likely induced some very beneficial, (survival-enhancing) genetic mutations among developing life forms, possibly kicking off the Cambrian explosion. There is also some evidence out of the University of Western Ontario (Dr. Grant Young) that a large impactor hit the earth around that same time period, which kicked off all kinds of climate mayhem. It likely caused drastic shifts in the earth's climatic zones, mysterious changes in the carbon cycle, and possibly sudden bursts of animal life that led to the Cambrian. In other words, possibly as a result of a nearby catastrophic gamma ray burst(s?) , and/or an asteroid collision, Opabinia almost quite literally "popped into being", along with Anomalocaris, Wiwaxia, Trilobites, Hallucigenia, and the whole lot of Cambrian creepy crawlers.

[@AlbertaGeek]

@@Trev0r98 _"a large gamma ray burst close to earth (within a few light years, perhaps)"_ Gamma ray bursts don't happen out of the blue. If there were something anywhere remotely near us in the galactic neighbourhood that could have made one, we'd know about it. Or rather we wouldn't know about it, because being hit by one inside of a thousand light-years would probably have sterilized the planet.

[@Trev0r98]

@@AlbertaGeek "Gamma ray bursts don't happen out of the blue." I never said they did.

[@AlbertaGeek]

@@Trev0r98 You are if you're saying that "perhaps" one happened anywhere near our system.

[@magemaroon5085]

yugioh players in 2016

[@sonarbangla8711]

How a lot of evolutionary change can occur in a short amount of time, may be the most important aspect of evolution. Tadpoles lose their tails transforming them into limbs in a matter of days, due to quantum tunneling, recently mastered by Khalili, can open up a new frontier.

[@lolface_9363]

It’s a Yu-Gi-Oh! Card

[@joshuahadams]

They picked a bunch of proper weirdos for the Paleozoic cards. I’m almost surprised there’s no Tullymonstrum card.

[@gabr.7878]

This is a wack animal

[@RaptorChatter]

Yeah, Opabinia is one of the classic weird fossils.

[@yoursotruly]

Hey, Five-eyes! Yeah, you, ya freak of nature, gimme yer lunch money or I'll knock two of those eyes right off yer head if ya call that a head! Don't look around for Tardigrade to save you, he's busy evolving right now, trying to become a bear, lol.

[@aft5264]

All of the cool/unique animals are extinct