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Anonymous
The 0.5 to 3 cm-long animal is wormlike that is, long and narrow with a poorly defined blob, or stain, on one end. This "blob" was arbitrarily designated the 'head' even though it had none of the features generally associated with heads: mouth, eyes, or other sensory organs. According to Morris' original interpretation, the animal has seven pincher-tipped tentacles lined up on one side and seven pairs of jointed spines on the other. Six of the tentacles are paired with spines, while one is in front of the spines. There are also six smaller tentacles which may be configured in three pairs behind the seven larger ones. In addition, there is a flexible, tube-like, tail-like body extension behind the tentacles.
Faced with an animal that had no obvious head and two types of appendages, neither of which seemed appropriate for any reasonable form of locomotion, Morris assigned the blob as the head and hypothesized that the spines were legs and that the tentacles were feeding appendages. Morris was able to demonstrate a workable if improbable method of walking on the spines. Only the forward tentacles can easily reach to the 'head,' meaning that a mouth on the head would have to be fed by passing food along the line of tentacles. Morris suggested that a hollow tube within each of the tentacles might be a mouth. This is a less-than-satisfactory reconstruction, but it was accepted as the best available. A picture of the animal as reconstructed by Morris can be found at [1].
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