Recently I've been watching David Attenborough's new series, First Life. It's an amazing series about some of the earliest known creatures on the planet, reconstructing some of the earliest developments which made life as we know it possible.
This is full of all kinds of weird and wonderful creatures, one of my favouries being the Anomalocaris. It's one of the first known predators, using a circular mouth and long claw-like limbs to hunt, a system of fins to swim freely and (probably) surprisingly complex compound eyes.
I think what really fascinates me about these creatures, though, is that they were pioneers, just working out which body arrangements would work, developing new senses and entirely new strategies for living. That's perhaps romanticising it a bit, especially since this is happening on evolutionary timescales.
So the, plan is to knit an anomalocarid. The basic structure will be a tubular body , a system of fins on each side, claws and eyes on the front and tail fins on the back. The interesting part will be getting the segmented structure -- I'm planning to cast off and pick up a few rows earlier to leave an overlapping flap for each segment. Looking forward to seeing how it turns out!
Hugh.
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