What do you get if you mix a jellysifh (Peytoia), a sponge (Laggania), a crustacean tail, a crustacean abdomen (Tuzoia) and some Sidneyia tails?







The answer is Anomalocaris, a very unusual fossil from the famous Burgess shale.

Cute!! Well, not really, but it's still just about big enough to play on the swings with you.

Unlike his rather more terrifying parents, who might have rather impolitely eaten you for dinner, this little guy didn't have the strength in its jaws to munch on such large things, so instead would have subsided principally on small, bite sized reptiles. He (they don't actually know the sex, but hey, lets call him a he) was probably around 2 or 3 when he died, which is about 7 or 8 in human years.

This week's Friday Fossil is Helicoprion.



What can I say. This is one weird bastard. And it used to look even weirder,



The story is like this. At the turn of the last century, people started to find these strange dinner plate sized fossils that look superficially like ammonites,



But then, on closer inspection, they look uncannily like shark teeth...

These are fulgerites,







Now, without googling (!) can you tell what they are?

You can find several fulgerites at Corrie on the Isle of Arran (I've heard that there were something like 5, but I could only find 2).

You might think that they look biological, but in actual fact they are found in wind-blown desert sandstones; not a site condusive to preserving fossils.