I mean they're only weird because we're not used to them, giraffes, narwals and sea-urchins are pretty weird as well.
Not to mention something like the platypus
Even snakes are bizarre. We have a creature with no limbs, just a very dangerous head and a potentially very dangerous body, and it uses its skin to move. And they can eat things whole which are several times the size of their head. Seriously, wtf.
Oh and even better, they range in size from adorable little worms to big enough to eat a human whole. And what kind of exercise do constrictors even do to get strong enough to suffocate something that outweighs it??
Even weirder is that snakes evolved from critters with legs, and multiple times independently. They were like "legs? We don't need no stinking legs."
Oh, how about those furless apes? I heard their offsprings have to be supervised ALL THE TIME for several years or they might kill themselves by accident. Crazy!
Edit: Shit I misread that comment.
Just think of the Cambrian as Life being roughly a multiplayer Spore-like game doing an open alpha test or an early access release.
They look like an average Spore creation. We have sword meatloaf, spiky hotdog, spaghetti mouth, and Bob.
Spore should sue for copyright infringement!
Leave them alone, they're just products of their environments!!
Why did swords sticking out of brain need to evolve?
Because up to that point animal life was closer to sponges than anything else. Maybe a moving blob here and there in the ediacaran. Then shit evolved predation, mobility, pursuit sensationโฆ And so what does the blob do? The simplest thing that by chance can change in its dna. And what is that? Hardened spikes with no real anchoring or repurposing. Just swords sticking out of a brain.
Meanwhile someone else is evolving to float around and have the majority of its body mass by stingers and someone else is becoming all of bugs
Anomalocaris means "weird shrimp" so I get the feeling the Cambrian freaks out the nerds sometimes, too.
My favorite ancient critter (actually pre-Cambrian) is Omnidont which means "all teeth".
The first picture is actually just an ancient router.
linksys brainswordianos
took a little while to figure out that somewhere between four and ten appendages with a mouth on the front and a butthole on the back was the best layout.
What was it, yesterday an article about some larvae, well preserved with organs after 500 million years. It threw it's shit out through the mouth.
Wiwaxia, Hallucigenia, Tully Monster and Anomalocaris if anyone's wondering
The aliens we were imagining as children?
We are way past that.
It's not a phase mom
Well someone hasn't played Spore.
These just look like normal deep sea creatures. Ever see those videos with the marine biologists talking while they explore the deep with an unmanned submarine? They find weird shit like this all the time.
