United States Fish and Wildlife Service list of threatened and endangered arthropods species may be treated as endangered or threatened if it resembles in appearance a species which has been listed and enforcement personnel would have difficulty distinguishing between the listed and the unlisted species; if the effect of this difficulty is an additional threat to the listed species; and if such treatment of the unlisted species would improve protection for the listed species. United States Fish and Wildlife Service list of threatened and endangered arthropods List of threatened and endangered arthropods, including insects, arachnids, and crustaceans under the United States Endangered Species Act as of October 2013. Key to Listing Status
Opabinia family tree is that modern tardigrades may be "Opabinia"s closest living evolutionary relatives. Although Zhang and Briggs (2007) disagreed with Budd's diagnosis that "Opabinia"s "triangles" were legs, the resemblance they saw between "Opabinia"s lobe+gill arrangement and arthropods' biramous limbs led them to conclude that "Opabinia" was very closely related to arthropods. In fact they presented a family tree very similar to Budd's except that theirs did not mention tardigrades. "Opabinia" made it clear how little was known about soft-bodied animals, which do not usually leave fossils. When Whittington described it in the mid-1970s, there was already a vigorous debate about