Herpetogaster is an extinct cambroernid genus of animal from the Early Cambrian Chengjiang biota of China, Balang Formation of China, Pioche Formation of Nevada and Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale of Canada containing the species Herpetogaster collinsi and Herpetogaster haiyanensis.
Herpetogaster is an extinct cambroernid genus of animal from the Early Cambrian Chengjiang biota of China, Balang Formation of China, Pioche Formation of Nevada and Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale of Canada containing the species Herpetogaster collinsi and Herpetogaster haiyanensis.
==Description== thumb|right| H. collinsi life restoration H. collinsi is known from over 160 specimens. It possessed a pair of branching tentacles and a tough but flexible body that curved helically to the right like a ram's horn and was divided into at least 13 segments. A flexible, extensible stolon emerged from the body at about the ninth segment and secured the animal to the sea floor, often by attaching to the sponge Vauxia. It is not known whether the attachment was permanent.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).