Opabinia Regalis - Theoretical Significance

Theoretical Significance

Opabinia made it clear how little was known about soft-bodied animals, which do not usually leave fossils. When Whittington described it in the mid-1970s, there was already a vigorous debate about the early evolution of animals. Preston Cloud argued in 1948 and 1968 that the process was "explosive", and in the early 1970s Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould developed their theory of punctuated equilibrium, which views evolution as long intervals of near-stasis "punctuated" by short periods of rapid change. On the other hand around the same time Wyatt Durham and Martin Glaessner both argued that the animal kingdom had a long Proterozoic history that was hidden by the lack of fossils. Whittington (1975) concluded that Opabinia, and other taxa such as Marrella and Yohoia, cannot be accommodated in modern groups. This was one of the primary reasons why Gould in his book on the Burgess Shale, Wonderful Life, considered that Early Cambrian life was much more diverse and "experimental" than any later set of animals and that the Cambrian explosion was a truly dramatic event, possibly driven by unusual evolutionary mechanisms. He regarded Opabinia as so important to understanding this phenomenon that he wanted to call his book Homage to Opabinia.

However, other discoveries and analyses soon followed, revealing similar-looking animals such as Anomalocaris from the Burgess Shale and Kerygmachela from Sirius Passet. Another Burgess Shale animal, Aysheaia, was considered very similar to modern Onychophora, which are regarded as close relatives of arthropods. Paleontologists defined a group called lobopods to include animals that are thought to be close relatives of arthropods but which lack jointed limbs. There is still debate about whether lobopods are monophyletic, i.e. whether they include all and only the descendants of a single common ancestor, and about whether arthropods are a sub-group of lobopods or a sister-group.

While this discussion about specific fossils such as Opabinia and Anomalocaris was going on, the concept of stem groups was introduced to cover evolutionary "aunts" and "cousins". A crown group is a group of closely related living animals plus their last common ancestor plus all its descendants. A stem group contains offshoots from members of the lineage earlier than the last common ancestor of the crown group; it is a relative concept, for example tardigrades are living animals which form a crown group in their own right, but Budd (1996) regarded them also as being a stem group relative to the arthropods. Viewing strange-looking organisms like Opabinia in this way makes it possible to see that, while the Cambrian explosion was unusual, it can be understood in terms of normal evolutionary processes.