The Prehistoric Puzzle

“Is that something there? In that rock?”

“You’re right, it looks like a fossilized shrimp.”

“A shrimp?”

“Yes- and look! There's another!”

As the summer sun beat down upon the mountains, the two paleontologists continued to dig through layers of shale. They began amassing an extensive collection of fossilized creatures, originating from over half a billion years in the past. They held in their hands their own history, their own ancestors. Both of the men had studied ancient life extensively and were confident they were gawking over what was once the ocean floor. They identified various sizes of charnia, an immobile animal that looked relatively similar to a plant.

“You’re certain that’s charnia and not just some weird fern, right?”

“I’m positive. This must have been the sea bed during the Cambrian period; it looks like it was volcanic ash that helped preserve them so well.”

They ran their fingers over the indentations in the stone, feeling the curves of remnants of animals far in the past, who seem almost alien today. They were standing in an abandoned ancient world once filled with life. It was as if they were connecting with the past, if only for a fleeting moment.

However, they could not quite decipher to whom each of the intricate impressions in the stone belonged. They had decided that the shrimp-like creatures were most likely the newly discovered Anomalocaris. Though nearby there lay a peculiar Peytoia jellyfish and what looked to them like a Laggania sponge.

“This doesn’t make sense, why would they all be preserved like this, so close together?”

“You’re right. What if we’ve been looking at this all wrong? That shrimp is odd because it has no head or intestine, right?”

“Correct.”

“So what if they aren’t shrimp? What if this is all one large animal?”

Their hypothesis turned out to be a reality. As soon as more animals from the Cambrian period were unearthed, it became clear that it was no coincidence that the odd shrimp, the jellyfish, and the sponge all turned up together. Once a fully intact fossil had been uncovered, it was easy to discern that the two shrimp were frontal hook-lined appendages to aid in predation. The jellyfish was the mouth of the animal, and the sponge was merely its soft tissued body.

That day, the paleontologists solved a mystery older than humanity itself. From sheets of rock, an unknown alien world emerged. They helped put together the puzzle of the planet’s first large predators. Without such a discovery, it would be difficult to understand the direct connections between animals today and their predecessors.