I just discovered the blog Life Before the Dinosaurs, all about the wild and wacky world that existed pre-Triassic. That’s more than enough for nerd in me to get excited, but then I learned that the blog is written by a seven year-old. Seven!
When I was seven, I spent most of my time playing with My Little Pony and taking naps. And, if we’re being honest, not much has changed.
From Life Before the Dinosaurs:
Wiwaxia was one of the weirdest of all the oddball animals of the Burgess Shale. It had a foot like a snail, a shell like a limpet, and scales like a fish on its shell. And the weirdest of all is that it had twelve glowing spines sticking out the top.
Kimberella was a strange creature that could have been a mollusc and lived in the Vendian Period. It had a strange lasagna-shaped foot and a flattened shell on top. It was 1/2″ to 4″.
Kimberella crawled along the sea floor looking for edible scraps because organisms didn’t start predation until the Cambrian Period.
Kimberella was a very weird creature because it had a shell and why would something have a shell if there was no predator? It did have a pretty hard shell.
I’m going to go invent a time machine so I can travel back to 1990 and tell my seven year-old self to get on it. But I’ll probably take a nap first.
Pretty amazing a seven year old kid is into doing something like that. That is awesome!
Are these creatures for real or is the seven year old making them up?
They’re very much for real. Or they were, before they went all extinct and such.