Opabinia Soft Model

Interview with Hirokazu Tokugawa

The Opabinia, a member of the Burgess fauna with a very strange style, is now available as a soft model. What kind of image do you have of Opabinia, Mr. Tokugawa?

The animals of the Burgess Shale are all strange, but I think Opabinia is one of the strangest of them all. It is thought to be a swimming predator, but there is also a theory that it has legs, as shown in this figure, so I imagine it could have walked around on the sea floor looking for food.

The first thing that strikes you when you see Opabinia is its unique and strange morphology. How did it evolve the five eyes on the front of its head and the tube-like organ at the tip of its head that looks like an elephant's snout? And what role did they play?

It is speculated that the tubular organ at the tip of the head was not a mouth, but was used to hold prey or food in its mouth and bring it to the mouth on the underside of the head. Since there is only one genus and one species of the genus Opabinia, and there are no related species with a similar appearance, the details of the acquisition of the rostrum during the evolutionary process are not known, but it is said to be closely related to Anomalocaris, which has an organ with a similar function. The five eyes are located on the head. The five eyes are an even stranger feature than the tubular organ in the head. Spiders and other animals with more than two eyes are known to exist, but the five eyes of Opabinia, along with the shape of the eyes protruding from the head, are particularly strange among the many designs that appeared in the Cambrian Explosion.

Opabi

While Opabinia gives us a sense of the diversity of the species, it is not easy to mold from a form that is not found in other creatures. Please let us know if there are any creatures or images that you used as a reference when creating the model.

For the legs, I referred to the sowbug, but for the rest of the body, I honestly wanted to use something as a reference, but I couldn't find anything like it in living animals. Also, the reconstructions differed depending on the publisher and year of publication, so we had to combine them.

The color scheme is based on a blue color scheme.　What kind of image did you have in mind?

One of the references I used for this model was a study that showed that Opabinia was phylogenetically close to the beetle and had legs similar to those of the beetle, so I used the colors of the beetle as a reference. I also used a nudibranch as a reference because it is a predator of about the same size. In addition, the color scheme of the Anomalocaris, which was previously commercialized in the Prehistoric Life series, is red, so I used a blue color scheme as a counterpoint to that.

Finally, please give us some comments about this model.

I think that Opabinia is one of the representative animals of the Burgess fauna, along with Anomalocaris. Its strange appearance seems to be a symbol of the ""Cambrian Explosion,"" an event in Earth's history when animals of various designs exploded onto the scene. On the other hand, despite its strange appearance, it is also somewhat humorous, and if you were able to observe a live Opabinia, you might have seen some gestures that you might even consider ""cute. If I had been able to observe a live Opabinia, I might have seen some ""cute"" gestures. This time, I've tried to create a pose with some movement, so I hope everyone will enjoy imagining the various forms and movements of Opabinia.

Supervisor profile

Hirokazu Tokugawa

An artist of reconstructed models of dinosaurs and other paleontological creatures, aiming to create works that combine academic research with the appeal of three-dimensional objects.