A dinner-plate-sized sculpture of a pea-sized Cambrian sea creature, Agnostus pisiformis. This trilobite-like creature dates back 500 million years.
Credit: Esben Horn

It looks like a space alien, or maybe a very deformed clam. But really, it's a re-creation of a 500-million-year-old life-form.

New images show a sculpture of Agnostus pisiformis, a now-extinct arthropod that used to live in what is today Scandinavia. These creatures, just four-tenths of an inch (1 centimeter) long when they were alive, are nevertheless known in exact anatomical detail because they've been preserved so perfectly in shale and limestones.

"The incredible degree of preservational detail means that we can grasp the entire anatomy of the animal, which, in turn, reveals a lot about its ecology and mode of life," Mats E. Eriksson, a geology professor at Lund University who commissioned the sculpted re-creation as part of a new paper in the journal Earth-Science Reviews, said in a statement.