''Cardiodictyon'' is a genus of
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 ...
known from 518 millions years old
Chengjiang Lagerstätte. 525 millions years old partial fossil is also reported.
It has ~25 pairs of legs, each associated with a pair of dorsal plates.
Each leg terminates in a pair of claws. It may or may not have a head shield, though it certainly has an expanded head.
In 2022, a 518 million years old specimen of ''C. catenulum'' was researched and shown an unsegmented head and a brain composed of three separate
cephalic
A head is the part of an organism which usually includes the ears, brain, forehead, cheeks, chin, eyes, nose, and mouth, each of which aid in various sensory functions such as sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Some very simple animals may ...
parts.
However, although "three parts" in this study means prosocerebrum,
protocerebrum and
deutocerebrum,
it is different from earlier studies that referred protocerebrum, deutocerebrum and tritocerebrum as tripartite brain of arthropod, and treated posocerebrum as part of protocerebrum.
References
Lobopodia
Prehistoric protostome genera
{{paleo-protostome-stub
Cambrian genus extinctions