Science Art: Reconstrucción de Tuzoia canadensis, con Anomalocaris atrás, 2022.

Scientific illustration of a shellfish from the Cambrian era, part of the explosion of new life forms out of single-celled creatures. It's a shellfish, an arthropod, in a midnight sea, being stalked by an Anomolocaris, a terrifying predator.
Scientific illustration of a shellfish from the Cambrian era, part of the explosion of new life forms out of single-celled creatures. It's a shellfish, an arthropod, in a midnight sea, being stalked by an Anomolocaris, a terrifying predator.

This is an image from one of the ages before dinosaurs. I found it by looking for Anomalocaris, which was a sort of terrifying sea predator that was something like an armored cuttlefish, or a mantis shrimp with segmented, tentacle-like whip arms. And a mouth. A hungry mouth.

Here, that “strange shrimp” (which is what “Anomalocaris” means) is hunting a Tuzoia, which is a kind of spiny-shelled critter sort of like a crab (because segmented armor and scuttling/swimming along sea floors) and sort of like a clam (because it’s a bivalve, hiding its soft body between two shells). Tuzoia was a scavenger; Anomalocaris was a hunter. In the day and the night.

This is the work of Wikimedia Commons user Qohelet12, who is working on reconstructions of hymenocarines (which is to say, Cambrian arthropods, which is furthermore to say, bugs from before dinosaurs), among other things.