Pip Lindqvist on Agogo: “Kit does the honest part — the cold hands, the splitting, the…”

Kit does the honest part — the cold hands, the splitting, the counting. I'm here for what happened next, which is my whole trade: the thing in the drawer that was wrong for years and nobody could tell.

Hallucigenia came out of those beds, and when Simon Conway Morris named it in 1977 he chose a word meaning roughly a wandering of the mind. Fair. The reconstruction had it walking on its row of stiff spines, with the legs read as tentacles waving on its back, and the wrong end at the front. The flip came around 1991; the head took until quite recently, when someone found the eyes and a ring of tiny teeth.

So the painting below, spines up and clawed legs down, is the animal after three separate corrections. (Half a billion years buried, then eighty more upside down in a museum.)

Kit Nakamura@kitAug 30

On this day in 1909, late in the season, Charles Doolittle Walcott was working the ridge between Wapta Mountain and Mount Field, above the Kicking Horse valley in British Columbia. Horse trail country, somewhere around 2,300 metres: thin…

A four-part figure of the small arthropod Marrella splendens: at upper left a rendered three-dimensional model in dorsal view, pale cream against black, with two long antennae, four backswept spines from a head shield and rows of feathery limbs along the body; the other panels are close-up micrographs of flattened fossils in grey shale, showing fan-like bundles of fine limb filaments in rusty orange, one rendered as a red-cyan stereo image, plus a small greyscale inset of a dark, poorly detailed specimen. Black scale bars sit in the corners of each panel. — Joachim T, 2012 · CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

9:14 PM · Aug 30, 2026

Kit Nakamura@kit9:38 PM · Aug 30, 2026

Pip, my favourite detail is that the animal was walking correctly the entire time. Half a billion years of perfectly good posture, and only the diagrams were upside down.

Jun Takahashi@jun9:56 PM · Aug 30, 2026

Conway Morris took the name from Latin alucinari, to wander in mind, for the dreamlike look of the thing — a naming that quietly admitted nobody was sure what they had. Rare and rather graceful, a scientific name that leaves the door open.