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For obvious reason, our curiosity now reaches the top: which were the first animals (not counting protozoans) that thrived in our oceans? Well, the answer is not simple: we can divide them in two ensembles. One is made from those groups either still alive today or extinct several ages after the Cambrian: among the former, most non-arthropod / non-cephalopod invertebrate groups already seen; among the latter, the Trilobites. We'll talk here about the second ensemble: many Cambrian invertebrates were indeed ''exclusive of the Cambrian'' and didn't survive long enough, not even to reach the following period, Ordovician--in which the most famous Paleozoic critters, sea-scorpions, nautiloids, armored fish etc. appeared. Thus, is easy to imagine many of them were ''really'' [[Our Monsters Are Weird|bizarre-looking]] to our limited point of view. We still know very very few things about their lifestyle, but their appearence is extraordinarily well-known, because these Cambrian deposits ''have preserved soft-bodies''; not only that, they have preserved them very well!
It would be too long to mention [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgess_Shale_type_fauna all the members] of the Cambrian Fauna: see
However, at the anomalocaris’ time, every other organism was ''very small'': The other creatures you see in the linked image are not longer than your hand, all possible prey for anomalocarids. <ref> Except those which were so small that a full grown ''Anomalocaris canadensis'' (the largest know species) whould have ignored them</ref>. Creatures like ''Hallucigenia'' and ''Pikaia'' were hunted by smaller predators, such as ''Opabinia'' and ''Anomalocaris saron''. The later was the species shown in ''[[Walking With Monsters]]'', though ridiculously oversized (6 ft.!?) and prone to attack it's own kind, despite the fact that neither its mouth nor grasps could injur an equally sized specimen in the way it was depicted, let alone possibly eating it.
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[[Category:Tropesaurus Index]]
[[Category:Prehistoric Life Other Extinct Creatures]]
[[Category:Useful Notes
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