Shishania
| Shishania Temporal range: Early Cambrian (Stage 4), ~
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|---|---|
Scientific classification 
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| Domain: | Eukaryota |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Mollusca |
| Genus: | †Shishania |
| Species: | †S. aculeata
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| Binomial name | |
| †Shishania aculeata Zhang et al., 2024
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Shishania is a genus of stem-group mollusc from the Cambrian period. It contains a single species, Shishania aculeata. Shishania specimens come from the Wulongqing Formation in China, and date back to around 514 to 509 million years ago. Shishania was a flattened, bilaterally symmetrical slug-like animal with a muscular foot. It had no shell, but was covered in hollow chitinous spines. These sclerites provide a stepping stone between the solid chaetae-like chitinous sclerites of Wiwaxia and the partially hollow, biomineralized sclerites of aculiferan molluscs. This suggests the mollusc ancestor was covered in hollow chitinous sclerites that shared a common origin with annelid chaetae.[1]
A paper published in Science in May 2025 disputes the classification of Shishania as a mollusc. Instead, the authors suggest it is an early-diverging chancelloriid closely affiliated to, or even synonymous with, Nidelric.[2]
References
[edit]- ^ Zhang, Guangxu; Parry, Luke A.; Vinther, Jakob; Ma, Xiaoya (2 August 2024). "A Cambrian spiny stem mollusk and the deep homology of lophotrochozoan scleritomes". Science. 385 (6708): 528–532. doi:10.1126/science.ado0059. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 39088612.
- ^ Yang, Jie; Li, Wei; Chen, Ai-lin; Du, Kun-sheng; Peng, Xiao; Wang, Yu; Zhang, Xi-guang; Smith, Martin R. (8 May 2025). "Shishania is a chancelloriid and not a Cambrian mollusk". Science. 388 (6747): 662–664. doi:10.1126/science.adv4635.