Today we celebrated the 100th year anniversary of the discovery of the strange and bizarre creatures found in the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies. These Cambrian creature fossils, over 500 million years old, give us important clues about evolution. They are irresistibly bizarre, and we HAD to recreate them!
Hallucigenia
Here David is reading our Charlie’s Playhouse Giant Timeline and Ancient Creature cards to Satori.
Charlie's Playhouse Giant Timeline and Ancient Creature Cards
As they read, mama gathers art/craft materials. Then we all choose our own Cambrian creature to make!
Mama chose the Hallucigenia, daddy the Opabinia, and Satori the Anomalocaris. Davi’s Opabinia is the blue creature, with 5 eyes, segmented body, and the proboscis.
Hallucigenia and 5-eyed Opabinia
After mom started making her psychedelic worm, Satori had to make one too. Here’s her Hallucigenia the far right, poor little fellow, its spines got all flattened!
We had such a blast we rushed in to make more creatures! David is using a pinecone to embed brown scales on his Wiwaxia.
I helped to add glow-in-the-dark spines on his back.
Wiwaxia with glow in the dark spines
Here’s my second creature, the Anomalocaris, a scary super predator of the Cambrian seas with a mouth full of teeth! When scientists first found his fossil, they thought he was 3 separate creatures!
Anomalocaris - a giant for its time
Wiwaxia Ancient Creature Card
And put them all together for our Burgess Shale Cambrian fauna zoo!
Our Burgess Shale Cambrian zoo
One important creature we left out was the Pikaia, which could possibly be the first chordate animal (with a backbone).
Think you are now familiar with the Cambrian Creatures? Try your luck at this Cambrian Creatures game!
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