5 Amazing Extinct Creatures That Aren't Dinosaurs

Who needs dinos when you have awesome sharks and horses and scorpions!

The Crux
By Charlotte Stephenson, University of Hull
Jun 18, 2015 9:55 PMJul 24, 2023 4:51 PM
Helicoprion Spiral-Lipped Shark - Dmitry Bogdanov CC BY
Helicoprion, the spiral-lipped shark. (Credit: Dmitry Bogdanov)

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The release of Jurassic World has reignited our love for paleontology. Many of us share a longing to understand the dinosaurs that roamed the Earth long before we arrived. But paleontology is a discipline much broader than this.

Dinosaurs dominated the land for 135 million years, but what happened during the rest of the Earth’s 4.6 billion-year history? The role of paleontologists past and present has been to unravel the mysteries of life on Earth, and in doing so they’ve found a lot more than just dinosaur bones. 

1. Spiky-Backed Ocean Dweller

Hallucigenia was discovered when a 508 million year old fossil was found in 1911 in the world-famous Burgess Shale fossil site in Canada. Since then, our understanding of this ocean-dwelling creature has changed dramatically.

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