Henry Gee

Okay, yes, the sucking up thing.

The Opopini was a strange shrimp-like creature.

It was a swimming creature.

It had lots of fins.

And it had five eyes on stalks.

And it had this long hosepipe mouth with jaws at the end.

That was a real weirdo.

I mean, but that's obscurely related to all these jointed limbs.

So that was one of them.

Anomalocaris, yes.

Now, Anomalocaris has a very checkered history.

Charles Walcott described a lot of different fossils

that turned out to be different bits of what we now know as the Lominocaris.

Now, it had a circular garbage grinder mouth with circular plates, but Walcott described a fossil which was just this circular mouth as a kind of jellyfish called Pytoia.

It also had segmented spiny fins.

pincer-type things at the front to stuff things into its mouth.

And these were described as some kind of shrimp.

And it wasn't until people found the whole thing, so this enormous shrimp-like thing with big googly eyes and this circular mouth and pincers to shove things into its mouth, they could be a metre long.

which was huge.

Back then, that is like the T-Rex of the day.