Margaretia

Margaretia is a frondose organism known from the middle Cambrian Burgess shale.[1] Its fronds reached about 10 cm in length and are peppered with a range of length-parallel oval holes. It was originally interpreted as an alcyonarian coral.[2] It was later reclassified as a green alga closely resembling modern Caulerpa by D.F. Satterthwait in her Ph.D. thesis in 1976,[3] a finding supported by Conway Morris and Robison in 1988.[2] More recently, it has been treated as a hemichordate.[4]

Margaretia
Temporal range: Middle Cambrian
Reconstruction of M. dorus
Scientific classification
Kingdom: incertae sedis
Genus: †Margaretia
Walcott, 1931
Species:
†M. dorus
Binomial name
†Margaretia dorus
Walcott, 1931
  • "Margaretia dorus". Burgess Shale Fossil Gallery. Virtual Museum of Canada. 2011.

References
  1. Briggs, D.E.G.; Erwin, D.H.; Collier, F.J. (1995), Fossils of the Burgess Shale, Washington: Smithsonian Inst Press, ISBN 1-56098-659-X, OCLC 231793738
  2. S.Conway Morris and R.A. Robison, "More soft-bodied Animals and Algae from the Middle Cambrian of Utah and British Columbia", University of Kansas Paleontological Contributions, Paper 122, pages 8-11, 1988.
  3. Donna Fields Satterthwait, Paleobiology and Paleoecology of Middle Cambrian Algae from Western North America, Ph.D. Thesis University of California at Los Angeles, 1976.
  4. Nanglu, Karma; Caron, Jean-Bernard; Conway Morris, Simon; Cameron, Christopher B. (2016). "Cambrian suspension-feeding tubicolous hemichordates". BMC Biology. 14 (1): 56. doi:10.1186/s12915-016-0271-4. ISSN 1741-7007. PMC 4936055. PMID 27383414.


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