Trilobite
Everything about trilobites: their 270 million year Paleozoic run, three-lobed bodies, mineralised calcite eyes, 22,000 described species, defensive enrolment, and their disappearance in the end-Permian mass extinction.
May 2025
Hallucigenia
Everything about Hallucigenia sparsa: the bizarre 508-million-year-old Cambrian lobopodian from the Burgess Shale, reconstructed upside-down and backwards for forty years and now recognised as an ancient cousin of velvet worms.
March 2025
Anomalocaris
Everything about Anomalocaris canadensis: the 515-million-year-old Cambrian apex predator from the Burgess Shale, misclassified as three separate animals for 99 years, and armed with 16,000-lens compound eyes and a radial-toothed circular mouth.
January 2025
Opabinia
Everything about Opabinia regalis: the five-eyed, clawed-proboscis Cambrian oddity from the Burgess Shale whose 1975 reconstruction was so strange that delegates at the Paleontological Association meeting laughed out loud.