Hallucigenia

For the album, see Hallucigenia (album).

Hallucigenia
Temporal range: Cambrian Stage 3–Middle Cambrian
Fossil holotype of Hallucigenia sparsa from the Burgess Shale
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
(unranked): Panarthropoda
Phylum: †"Lobopodia"
Clade: †Hallucishaniids
Family: †Hallucigeniidae
Genus: †Hallucigenia
Conway Morris, 1977[1]
Species
  • H. sparsa (Walcott, 1911) (type)
  • H. fortis Hou & Bergström, 1995[2]
  • H. hongmeia Steiner et al 2012[3]
Synonyms

Canadia sparsa

Hallucigenia is a genus of lobopodian known from Cambrian aged fossils in Burgess Shale-type deposits in Canada and China, and from isolated spines around the world.[4] The generic name reflects the type species' unusual appearance and eccentric history of study; when it was erected as a genus, H. sparsa was reconstructed as an enigmatic animal upside down and back to front.[1] Lobopodians are a grade of Paleozoic panarthropods from which the velvet worms, water bears, and arthropods arose.[5][4]

  1. ^ a b Conway Morris, S. (1977). "A new metazoan from the Cambrian Burgess Shale of British Columbia" (PDF). Palaeontology. 20: 623–640. Archived from the original (PDF) on 31 March 2017. Retrieved 27 January 2021.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference HOU-1995 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Steiner, M.; Hu, S.; Liu, J.; Keupp, H. (2012). "A new species of Hallucigenia from the Cambrian Stage 4 Wulongqing Formation of Yunnan (South China) and the structure of sclerites in lobopodians" (PDF). Bulletin of Geosciences. 87 (1): 107–124. doi:10.3140/bull.geosci.1280.
  4. ^ a b Zimmer, Carl (2 July 2015). "The Cambrian Explosion's Strange-Looking Poster Child". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
  5. ^ Ortega-Hernández, Javier (5 October 2015). "Lobopodians". Current Biology. 25 (19): R873–R875. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2015.07.028. ISSN 0960-9822. PMID 26439350.