They’re arthropods, so in terms of the appearance in the fossil record, it’s pretty much what they are completely. Idk how far you wanna go in terms of evolutionary ancestry, but they’ve conserved most of their featured for a quite a long time:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2020.00098/full
Imagine if these things were actually chubby lil guys with lots of soft fatty parts and cartilage but this is just what’s left of them
You’re looking at a photo of a horseshoe crab. Still very much alive and complete.
Yeah but like, what if their ancestors were different and they just evolved it all away?
They’re arthropods, so in terms of the appearance in the fossil record, it’s pretty much what they are completely. Idk how far you wanna go in terms of evolutionary ancestry, but they’ve conserved most of their featured for a quite a long time: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2020.00098/full
Considering they’re still alive…
I wanted to say, it would look like a Pokémon, but then I remembered that these things already are a Pokémon…