Doctor Moonlight, or Autumn! She/They/It- 25 yo Transfemme! Molecular Biology and Gothic Lit- Stitching myself back together, one limb at a time. MINORS DNI
Its getting bad again. But I'll be okay. Just need some time to figure out if I'm a real human and deal with the cognitive dissonance, will resume as normal.
“When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.”
holy SHIT please read the whole thread and many more of these images right here, this artist put together an updated Opabinia reconstruction where every single one of these minute details (except coloration, obviously) are fully sourced making this most likely the first depiction factoring in 100% of current knowledge about it.
Even I didn’t know it had little feet like a velvet worm and could have walked around on them! I never knew exactly how the trunk is oriented or how many “teeth” it is! I especially didn’t know the mouth was that weird!
And I kind of assumed this since it’s a lobopod and all, but the whole animal was soft and squishy except for the eyes and the teeth. It did not have armor plates or a jointed exoskeleton like a lot of people portray. This also means all five of the eyes would have been able to bend and look around independently!
The eye structure in fossils also indicates that they would have PSEUDOPUPILS! That’s the pupil-like dot in the eyes of insects like mantises!