The Luolishaniidae or Luolishaniida are a group of

Cambrian The Cambrian Period ( ; sometimes symbolized C with bar, Ꞓ) was the first geological period of the Paleozoic Era, and of the Phanerozoic Eon. The Cambrian lasted 53.4 million years from the end of the preceding Ediacaran Period 538.8 million ...

and Ordovician

lobopodian The lobopodians, members of the informal group Lobopodia (from the Greek language, Greek, meaning "blunt feet"), or the formally erected phylum Lobopoda Cavalier-Smith (1998), are panarthropods with stubby legs called lobopods, a term which may ...

s with anterior 5 or 6 pairs of setiferous lobopods. Most luolishaniids also have posterior lobopods each with a hooked claws, and thorn-shaped sclerites arranged as three or more per trunk segment. The type genus is based on '' Luolishania longicruris'' Hou and Chen, 1989, from the Chengjiang Lagerstatte, South China. They are presumed to have been

benthic The benthic zone is the ecological region at the lowest level of a body of water such as an ocean, lake, or stream, including the sediment surface and some sub-surface layers. The name comes from ancient Greek, βένθος (bénthos), meaning "t ...

suspension or filter feeders. New specimens of the previously enigmatic '' Facivermis'' show that it was a sessile tube-dweller, and part of this group.

References

Lobopodia Cambrian invertebrates Prehistoric protostome families {{paleo-protostome-stub