Wiwaxia

A small, spiny, scaly animal from the Burgess Shale.

About an inch long. Beside a person 1.75 m tall; ticks every metre.Body shape drawn for this site

When: Middle Cambrian
Where: Burgess Shale, British Columbia, Canada
Size: About an inch long

A small oval fossil fringed with long pointed spines, on pale grey rock. — Wiwaxia from the Burgess Shale. The long blades are its spines.Wiwaxia 3G crop by Martin R. Smith, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized.

Wiwaxia was an inch-long animal that crept over the sea floor, covered in scales and spines. It was first described from the Burgess Shale in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, the best known of all Cambrian fossil sites.

Nobody is sure what it was related to: perhaps the molluscs, perhaps the worms, perhaps an extinct group with features of both. It is one of the Burgess Shale’s “weird wonders”.

Wiwaxia: about 508 million years ago. That is 11% of the way back to the Earth’s birth.Periods from the ICS chart

Also in early animals

Charnia A frond-shaped living thing from the Ediacaran sea floor
Auroralumina attenboroughii Described by its finders as the earliest known animal predator
Anomalocaris A Cambrian predator with huge compound eyes

Sources

University of California Museum of Paleontology, The Cambrian Period