Hallucigenia

This bizarre, tiny marine creature is one of the strangest things found in the fossil record. An inch (three centimetres) long,it had seven pairs of tentacled feet (each equipped with a pair of pincers and a tube connected to the central gut), seven pairs of spines on its back, a bulbous “head” (poorly preserved in all specimens – we don’t really know which end is which!), six more smaller tentacles – the more you examine this creature, the odder it looks.

Hallucigenia lived in the Cambrian Era, nearly half a billion years ago – at the same time as the monstrous Anomalocaris