Life of the Oceans - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 151

The two took the 5-kilometre walk up to the hill called Maotianshan
where they had been collecting. It seemed like an average morning on
that quiet road, with the occasional passing farmer. Hou had with
him an umbrella and the farmer carried a plastic sheet to keep off the
rain, although he recalls that often his legs got very wet below the
knees. After a breakfast of noodles, Hou was in good spirits, and carried
with him some steamed bread for lunch. As ever, he was searching for
the enigmatic little bradoriids, when at about three o'clock in the
afternoon a slab of rock broke open to reveal a trilobite called Naraoia .
Hou Xianguang had seen trilobites many times before in these rocks,
but this one was different: Hou could see immediately that this fossil
had legs. He was dazzled by what he saw before him—it seemed as
though the animal was alive, as if it was trying to swim across the
surface of the mudstone. He carried on working that day until dark,
making the walk back to Dapotou village—a hazardous journey in
darkness—along the winding mountain road. Hou was not worrying
about the dark. That night he could barely sleep for excitement, as he
realized that he had discovered the oldest soft-bodied Cambrian fauna
in the world, one so old that it had existed only shortly after animals
themselves had originated.
Chengjiang is truly remarkable. Here, in rocks over 520 million
years old, are the bodies of a multitude of arthropods—from the
familiar trilobites, to the much weirder-looking Fuxianhuia . Preserved
even with its brain, this creature looks a bit like a large sea slater with
a long tail and stalked eyes (Fig. 16). Then there are the arthropods
such as Fortiforceps , with its large stalked eyes and protruding forceps-
like frontal pincers—clearly a combination evolved to help hunt and
eat other animals. Here too there are worms, including many pria-
pulids; lobopods that look like silk-producing modern velvet worms;
jellyfish-like cnidarians, sponges, and animals that are more familiar
to Cambrian rocks everywhere, especially brachiopods (lamp shells).