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Despite its diminutive size, the creature still managed to pack a lot of nightmare fuel. Those 45 tentacles were used to snatch up food, creep along the ocean floor and scare off predators.
Oh, and those “tubes” also had their own armor.
“The tube feet of living echinoderms are naked, but in the ophiocistioids they were plated,” Yale paleontologist Derek Briggs, a co-author of the study, said in a news release. “Our analysis strongly suggests that ophiocistioids diverged from the line leading to modern sea cucumbers.”
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