ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Wiwaxia

Wiwaxia is an animal, kind of like an insect, that lived about 500 million years ago, before even the dinosaurs existed! Imagine a little critter with a soft body that was covered in hard plates all over it, like a superhero's armor. It was about the size of your hand and had little spikes sticking out of its back that looked like feathers.

Wiwaxia lived in the ocean and crawled along the bottom to find food, which was usually bits of dead plants and animals. It used its little legs to move around and its armor made it hard for any predators to eat it.

Even though it's extinct now, scientists have found fossils of wiwaxia that tell us a lot about what it looked like and how it survived in its environment. We can learn a lot about the history of life on Earth by studying creatures like wiwaxia!
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