Waptia fieldensis

We find eggs, embryos, and in some cases, animals actually carrying their developing offspring around with them.

Enter Waptia.

Waptia was a little Burgess shale arthropod, which is just a fancy word for an animal with a hard outer shell, segmented body, and jointed legs.

Think shrimp, crab, or any bug you've ever tried not to think about.

And fossils have been found with females carrying clusters of eggs underneath their shell-like carapace.

Once that process began, it never stopped.

Waptia was a primitive crustacean that lived in the Cambrian seas and represented an important early experiment in body design.

This creature was not a real shrimp or a real lobster, but something intermediate.

Waptia presented a bilobulated appendix that could have been used to collect food or to reproduce.

Its exact purpose remains mysterious, and that is part of what makes the first creatures of the Cambrian so fascinating.

Scientists do not possess perfect information about their lives, only the hard, preserved parts that survived the fossilization process.