Puzzle Description:

I can't resist seeing what people guess this is... so I will give further information in the comments!

#1: Adam Nielson (monkeyboy) on Sep 18, 2009 [SPOILER]

It looks like a rooster/fish, with a spiky dinosaur tail. :-)

I really have no idea. But with the title "someWHEN," I was thinking prehistoric or something.

The Anomalocaris was discovered in the 19th century and given a name meaning "strange shrimp." Joseph Frederick Whiteaves described a part of it as the tail of a peculiar shrimp or lobster—but this part was later identified as a feeding arm, depicted in red in this puzzle. The round mouth was originally thought to be a jellyfish, and the body was described as a sponge. Later research on some amazingly well-preserved fossils, most famously in the Burgess Shale, uncovered this fearsome predator's true form. The entire body was soft except the mouth and feeding arms. Directly behind the feeding arms was a pair of eyes on stalks. The lobed fins (depicted here in blue) acted as a single fin on each side in the creature's undulating swimming motion, and the tail fins (green) provided stability. Anomalocaris was most closely related to today's lobopods, a group of animals resembling legged worms that are poorly known to anybody but zoologists, but was also related to arthropods (the huge phylum including insects, spiders, crustaceans, and the extinct trilobites).

Most amazing about Anomalocaris, in my opinion, is that it was one of the first complex animals to exist, known from the Cambrian period, almost half a billion years ago, yet it had a number of unique derived* features and, furthermore, was huge by the standards of its day: up to a meter in length, when most animals reached lengths of millimeters or, at most, centimeters. The fact that it's a predatory "monster" is pretty cool, too.

*"Derived" is an evolutionary biology term roughly equivalent to what a layperson might call "advanced." It means a feature that is a novel adaptation compared to its ancestors. In humans, derived features include complex brains and feet and hips adapted for upright walking. The opposite of derived is "basal" (what laypeople call "primitive"). In humans, basal features include our rather generic teeth and digestive systems, neither of which is particularly specialized toward any one type of diet.

More information on Anomalocaris, including an animated gif of its swimming motion:
http://www.trilobites.info/anohome.html

Thanks for you "feather fish"!

You should have waited to see what others though before posting your comment in #2. You still have time to remove it, and let other guess, before you repost it.

Wow, very interesting. I thought it would either be an alien creature from some sci-fi movie or something from the deep blue sea.

Thanks for the great puzzle and also for the link. Just fascinating. You could do an entire series on trilobites! With your artistry and puzzle-making skills, you could make us very happy puzzlers. :-)

I thought it was a Feather at first. A very fancy feather, but a feather.

I thought it was a dragon kite flying up towards the sun.

Beautiful.

ditto #6

Beautiful puzzle!

I was going to guess fishing lure.

LOL, Rich, the irony is that fish had not even appeared in the oceans yet when Anomalocaris was around!

I would've guessed the skeletal remains of some exotic type of fish.

I did imagine something either swimming or floating/flying in the air. Gorgeous and fascinating.

Goto next topic

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