 Whittington 's first presentation about Opabinia made the audience laugh . The reconstruction showed a soft @-@ bodied animal with a slim , segmented body ; a pair of flap @-@ like appendages on each segment with gills above the flaps ; five stalked eyes ; a backward @-@ facing mouth under the head ; and a long , flexible , hose @-@ like proboscis that extended from under the front of the head and ended in a " claw " fringed with spines . Whittington concluded that it did not fit into any phylum known in the mid @-@ 1970s . Opabinia was one of the main reasons why Stephen Jay Gould in his book Wonderful Life considered that Early Cambrian life was much more diverse and " experimental " than any later set of animals , and that the Cambrian explosion was a truly dramatic event , possibly driven by unusual evolutionary mechanisms . He regarded Opabinia as so important to understanding this phenomenon that he originally wanted call his book Homage to Opabinia . However subsequent research has concluded that Opabinia is closely related to the arthropods and possibly even closer to ancestors of the arthropods . 
