Maotianshan Shales fossil record. Phylum Porifera (sponges; 15 species) and Priapulida (16 species) are also well represented. Other phyla represented are Brachiopoda, Chaetognatha, Cnidaria, Ctenophora, Echinodermata, Hyolitha, Nematomorpha, Phoronida, and Chordata. Possible molluscs include "Wiwaxia" and "Nectocaris". About one in eight animals are problematic forms of uncertain affinity, some of which may have been evolutionary experiments that survived for only a brief period as benthic environments rapidly changed in the Cambrian. Chengjiang is the richest source of the lobopodia, a group including many early panarthropods, with six genera represented: "Luolishania", "Paucipodia", "Cardiodictyon"," Hallucigenia" (also known from the Burgess Shale), "Microdictyon", and "Onychodictyon".
Bacterial phyla prevents it to be validated, such as where the only evidence is DNA sequence data, even if the whole genome has been sequenced. When the species are members of a whole phylum it is called a candidate division (or candidate phylum) and in 2003 there were 26 candidate phyla out of 52. A candidate phylum was defined by Hugenholtz and Pace in 1998, as a set of 16S ribosomal RNA sequences with less than 85% similarity to already-described phyla. More recently an even lower threshold of 75% was proposed. Three candidate phyla were known before 1998, prior to the 85%