Researchers have uncovered more about the ancient marine creature Odaraia alata, which they say could have swum upside down to gather food among the spines along its legs. (Danielle Dufault/Royal Ontario Museum)

We’ve got another post about a Cambrian animal, today.  This one comes from CBC News and is about some recent research on Odaraia alata.   O. alata is one of the odd looking animals found in the Burgess Shale in British Columbia, Canada.  Paleontologists weren’t even sure where to classify it.  Was it an arthropod, or was it something different?  Now, a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows that O. alata is one of the first members of a group called mandibulates, which is related to modern insects.   It was a great swimmer with 30 legs!

“We had a really good reconstruction of this animal in the 1980s, by Prof. Derek Briggs, who is now at Yale University,” said the paper’s lead author, Alejandro Izquierdo López, who was based at the ROM during this work as a PhD student at the University of Toronto.

“It’s not until now that we have the material evidence for these ideas. Now we know exactly what it was feeding on and how it was feeding.”

The ROM contains the largest collection of Cambrian fossils found in the Burgess Shale.

“Thanks to the work we have been doing at the ROM on amazing fossil animals … we already know a substantial amount about the early evolution of mandibulates,” study co-author Jean-Bernard Caron, the Richard M. Ivey Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology at the ROM, said in a release. “However, some other species had remained quite enigmatic, like Odaraia.”