Finally Found a Home in the Failed Evolutionary Tree of Life for a Cambrian Worm?
Paleontologists have been baffled for many years by a fossil. It looks like something that someone may imagine in a drug-induced state, but it is real. How to classify it has been a problem, but a new fossil discovery that is more complete gave evolutionists hope that they know where to put it in the "Tree of Life". But are they doing anything more than guessing and putting it where they want it to be? Linking it to modern creatures because of similar features is not a guarantee of an evolutionary relationship.
Hallucigenia sparsa may look like a sci-fi alien but it is very much a resident of earth—the earth of the past, that is. This tiny fossil has been a real paleontology puzzle.You can read the rest by clicking on "Wormlike Evolutionary Misfit from the Burgess Shale Finds a Home".
While the best-preserved fossils now show this little animal had seven or eight pairs of claw-tipped legs matching two rows of conical spikes on its back, the original fossils only showed one row of legs, and confusion has long clouded attempts to reconstruct, much less classify, this animal. Evolutionary researchers from the University of Cambridge now believe they have definitive proof of not only what this animal was but also what it evolved into and consequently where it fits on the evolutionary tree of life.