onychophorokin

A cartoon Hallucigenia:



Not anatomically correct (not are the Pikaia), but that's why it's a cartoon, dammit.

Yes, this Hallucigenia is upside down. It's easier to get it to stand up on spikes than on curvy legs. I'm working on one that is closer to anatomically correct. Thanks for the feedback on the Aysheaia last month by the way.

Hello - This is a (crude) clay sculpture of Aysheaia. I realize that Aysheaia doesn't have as appealing a name as Hallucigenia, but it's still a velvet worm ancestor. Thank you for your attention.

*sniff* petit-Burgess arrivistes, say I.

Why, I can trace my ancestry to the preprotoPhanerozoic... I'm a stromatolite on my mother's side, and Papa was a well-known prokaryote.

Here's my first picture of my true spirit form. ^___^



This is inspired by my awakened memories of traveling on the astral plane. ^_^ I think I was an astral plane pilot, once.

Since i was a little kid i knew i was different. all the other kids had favorite animals like dogs and horses, but i liked velvet worms. Then one day in high school i dropped some acid and had a vision of spikes growing out of my belly and a row of pincer tenticles conveying food along my back to my head which was big and bulbous, like mr. mackey on south park. during full moons i go to the beach, submerge myself in the water and use my filters (transformed from my teeth) and sift the sand for particles of food.

People say velvet worms are not intelligent, and that they are the ancestors of arthropods. well i don't feel tht way. i know that my soul is as intelligent as humans and has just as many feelings. i know velvet worms have caring families, because in my past life a large Tuzoia ate my mate and 800 children, who i still feel a deep connection too.

I first awakened when I was in junior high school. The other guys would all go out and play football, but I prefered to graze on the benthic substrates of the sports field, passively digesting plankton out of the copious amounts of sand I swallowed. I also from an early age found it difficult to differentiate between my dorsal and ventral sides. I alwys felt myself walking on phantom spines, waving my tentacles freely in the warm current. But then one day I realised I had it all wrong. My tentacles were for locomotion and my spines formed a defensive mechanism, protecting me from the predations of Anomalocaris and also those preppy jock bastard sheep. I had to flip myself around in conceptual space, and with that realignment came the awareness that I was Hallucigenia.