Wiwaxia, the armored slug. – Fossil Zoo

Over a century ago, in 1899, Canadian geologist George Frederick Matthew described an isolated fossil spine under the name Orthotheca corrugata. Not much can be done with a simple spine, but Matthew related it to the genus Orthotheca, which at that time was considered an annelid worm, although today it is classified in the group of hyoliths, small animals with conical shells that lived in the Paleozoic. Corrugata means “grooved”, as this was the fossil spine, which had been found on Mount Stephen, in southeastern British Columbia, where the famous Burgess shale deposit is also located. It was there that years later, in 1911, the American paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott found several fossils with the same spines, which he classified as polychaete worms under the name of Wiwaxia.