
Hallucigenia is a genus of lobopodian known from Cambrian-aged fossils in Burgess Shale-type deposits in Canada (Burgess Shale) and China, and from isolated spines around the world. The generic name reflects the type species' unusual appearance and eccentric history of study; when it was erected as a genus, H. sparsa was reconstructed as an enigmatic animal upside down and back to front. Lobopodians are a grade of Paleozoic panarthropods from which the velvet worms, water bears, and arthropods arose.
Hallucigenia is a genus of lobopodian known from Cambrian-aged fossils in Burgess Shale-type deposits in Canada (Burgess Shale) and China, and from isolated spines around the world. The generic name reflects the type species' unusual appearance and eccentric history of study; when it was erected as a genus, H. sparsa was reconstructed as an enigmatic animal upside down and back to front. Lobopodians are a grade of Paleozoic panarthropods from which the velvet worms, water bears, and arthropods arose.
==Description== thumb|Reconstructions of H. fortis, H. hongmeia, and H. sparsa in scale.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).