Opabinia
Opabinia was a small, soft sea animal that lived about 505 million years ago. It had five eyes on stalks and a long, bendy nose like a vacuum cleaner hose with a claw at the end. Its body had flaps along the sides and a fan-shaped tail.
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Fun facts
Its mouth was under its head and pointed backwards, so its long nose had to bend round to feed it.
It looked so strange that when a scientist first showed his drawings of it, the audience laughed.
Its body had 15 parts, and each one had a pair of flaps on the sides.
It is named after Opabin Pass, a mountain pass in Canada near where it was found.
Fewer than twenty good fossils of it have ever been described.
Most asked questions about Opabinia
?How many eyes did Opabinia have?
Five. Two near the front, two bigger ones at the back, and one in the middle.
?How big was Opabinia?
Small. It was about 4 to 7 centimetres long, not counting its long nose.
?When did Opabinia live?
About 505 million years ago, in the Cambrian period, long before the dinosaurs.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Opabinia
- Named by
- Walcott, 1912
- Group
- Prehistoric giants
- Family
- Opabiniidae
- Classification
- Dinocaridida > Opabiniida > Opabiniidae
Where the facts come from
- Opabinia (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Han Zeng. CC0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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