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Opabinia
Opabinia’s five eyes sat on top of its head. At the front it carried a flexible nozzle tipped with a claw, which may have passed food back toward the mouth underneath. A Burgess Shale specimen preserves the eyes and the nozzle together, so the combination comes from the fossil itself.
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Hallucigenia
Two rows of spikes made Hallucigenia hard to put back together. An early reconstruction stood the animal on the spikes. Better fossils showed that the delicate limbs on the opposite side, some with tiny claws, were the legs.
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Helicoprion
The fossil that gives Helicoprion away is a spiral of teeth embedded in a single root. For decades, researchers disagreed about where it belonged. A fossil with preserved cartilage showed that the whorl sat in the lower jaw of this sharklike fish.
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Deinocheirus
For decades, Deinocheirus was known mainly by a pair of enormous arms. More complete fossils revealed a deep, broad snout and tall spines along its back. The bones changed the mental picture from a pair of oversized arms to a hulking dinosaur with a broad bill and a raised back.
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Dickinsonia
Dickinsonia looks like an oval leaf with ribs running along both sides. Its outline alone made it difficult to classify. Researchers found traces of cholesterol in a fossil and used that chemical evidence, alongside its shape, to make the case that it was an early animal.
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Anomalocaris
Anomalocaris was difficult to piece together. Its spiny grasping appendages and its ring of mouth plates were initially described separately. Whole specimens showed a swimmer with paired appendages at the front and flaps running down both sides.
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Wiwaxia
A complete Wiwaxia fossil shows overlapping plates across its back with taller spines rising above them. The early fossils were only loose pieces of armor. A whole specimen makes sense of those pieces and reveals the flattened underside of this slug-shaped animal.
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Cambroraster
The broad head shield of Cambroraster curves outward like a horseshoe. Fossils also preserve comb-like appendages around its mouth. Its researchers suggest those spines could have sorted small prey from sediment near the seafloor.
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Dunkleosteus
Dunkleosteus had sharp edges made from jaw plates rather than individual teeth. The plates fit together like blades. The fossil head armor is distinctive even when the rest of the fish is missing, which is one reason its length and outline have been harder to reconstruct.
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Tullimonstrum
The Tully monster had eyes on the ends of a rigid crossbar and a grasping tip at the end of a long stalk. Those features are recognizable in the fossils, but researchers still disagree about where this soft-bodied swimmer belongs on the animal family tree.
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Arthropleura
Arthropleura was long known from armored segments that looked like parts of an enormous millipede. CT scans of small specimens finally revealed a head with short antennae and eyes on stalks. The fossils gave researchers a view of features that the big body fragments had never shown.
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Dimetrodon
Dimetrodon’s back rose into a sail supported by elongated spines from its vertebrae. The silhouette looks like something from a dinosaur display, but the skeleton belongs to an earlier branch of animals on the mammal side of the family tree.
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Inostrancevia
Inostrancevia had long saber-shaped canine teeth before there were cats. It belonged to a group of early relatives of mammals. Look at the skull and its tooth sockets to see how far back that familiar-looking arrangement goes.
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Atopodentatus
Atopodentatus had a wide, flat snout like a hammer head. Better skull fossils showed sharp front teeth along the flattened edge and finer teeth farther back. The study proposes that it scraped plants from underwater surfaces and strained out small pieces.
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Elasmosaurus
Elasmosaurus had an extraordinarily long neck. In an early reconstruction, paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope put the head at the end of what was actually the tail. Look at a corrected mount to see the neck running out in front of the marine reptile’s four flippers.
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Tanystropheus
Tanystropheus hydroides stretched an extraordinarily long neck from just thirteen elongated vertebrae. The skull gave a separate clue about how it lived. Its nostrils opened on top, consistent with an animal that spent time in the water.
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Drepanosaurus
One finger on the front foot of Drepanosaurus ended in an outsized claw. Fossils show an equally unusual connection at the wrist, where elements of the forearm shift from the familiar reptile arrangement. The researchers compared the claw to an anteater’s tool for opening up a nest.
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Odontochelys
Odontochelys already had a hard shield across its belly. Its back had broad ribs but lacked the complete upper shell of a modern turtle. The partly shelled fossils show that the underside and top did not have to take shape at the same time.
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Spicomellus
One unusual rib gave Spicomellus away. Spikes were fused straight onto its outer surface. More fossils revealed an even more elaborate arrangement, with long spikes jutting out from a bony collar on the neck.
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Amargasaurus
Two rows of bony projections rose along the neck of Amargasaurus. A study of their internal structure found evidence consistent with a soft-tissue sail. The unusual bones are certain, even though the exact outline of the living neck is a reconstruction.
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Yi (dinosaur)
Yi qi had feathers, but an extra rod of bone extended from its wrist. Preserved scraps of tissue suggest a wing membrane supported in part by that rod. The fossils show that at least one small dinosaur experimented with a wing plan very different from a bird’s feathered wing.
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