Artist's commentary
Sirius Passet fauna
My most Ray Trollesque piece so far.
The Sirius Passet laggerstatten is a fossil outcropping found along the coast of Greenland. Fossils are of Cambrian age and predate the famous Burgess Shael, instead being more contemporaneous with the fauna of the Chengjiang site.
Here I depicted the animals on a deep-water sponge reef, similar to the reefs found in cold Canadian waters.
The animals depicted here are:
Kiisortoqia soperi-- the large swimming arthropod to the left. This large predator is believed to be an anomalocarid, or at least an ancestor to the line.
Pambdelurion whittingtoni-- the red creatures with the hammer-heads. Another possible early anomalocarid
Kerygmachela kierkegaardi-- the white arthropod on the bottom left with the long "antennae". Also another possible anomalocarid or anomalocarid ancestor.
Halkieria evangelista-- the brown, sea-cucumber looking critters. Feed on the extensive bacterial mats that cover the Cambrian seafloor using a mollusk-like radula.
Kleptothule rasmusseni -- the long, blue arthropods. Possibly an early trilobite, though it lacks some of the features of more derived members of the group.
Ooedigera peeli -- the swimming, bumpy-carapaced critters. These are a member of the bizarre vetulicolians, which may be an extinct lineage of chordates or at least hemichordates.
Isoxys volucris The swimming, half-circle shaped arthropods.
Phragmochaeta canicularis the bristle-worm crawling on the sponges in the lower right. fossils of phragmochaeta are fragmentary, so the animal is partially speculative, based on similar bristleworms found int he Chengjiang deposits.
Pauloterminus spinodorsalis The shrimp-like swimming arthropods, possibly related to the Burgess Shale species Waptia
Aaveqaspis inesoni The red trilobites with the spines on their tails
Buenaspis forteyi The brown trilobites just under Kerygmachela
Hadranax augustus The blue lobopods crawling on the sponges. Another species known only from incomplete specimens.
The pink, disk-shaped objects with radiating spines are Choia sponges.