

It looks like a space alien, or maybe a very deformed clam. But really, it's a re-creation of a 500-million-year-old life-form.

New images show a sculpture of Agnostus pisiformis, a now-extinct arthropod that used to live in what is today Scandinavia. These creatures, just four-tenths of an inch (1 centimeter) long when they were alive, are nevertheless known in exact anatomical detail because they've been preserved so perfectly in shale and limestones.

"The incredible degree of preservational detail means that we can grasp the entire anatomy of the animal, which, in turn, reveals a lot about its ecology and mode of life," Mats E. Eriksson, a geology professor at Lund University who commissioned the sculpted re-creation as part of a new paper in the journal Earth-Science Reviews, said in a statement.


More From LiveScience

The odd little critter is also useful to modern scientists as what's called an index fossil. Index fossils are fossils that appear in only a particular time period, so they're used to date layers of rock: If the fossils appear in a rock layer, there's no question about when that layer formed.


The researchers and artists hope their creations will go on display in a traveling exhibit about the bizarre animals of the Cambrian seas. In their paper, they called the period "one of the most exciting times in Earth history." The Cambrian period was the time of the Cambrian explosion, a rapid diversification of life that gave rise to a host of oddball creatures.

Original article on Live Science.