Haha, the author claims this animal is an early ancestor of the whale. I would like to inspect that family tree.
The author didn’t. Whoever wrote the captions for the article did. Even so, I suspect it was meant figuratively (Brit English and all that).
My main question is, how do they know this isn’t just a “better” fossil of Anomalocaris, where the filter appendages are visible? There aren’t all that many Anomalocaris fossils to begin with; perhaps all the earlier ones were of already-dead animals where the soft filtering tissues were eaten away.
This is why there is a problem wirth evolution. They want everything to evolve from the “lowest llife forms”. Oncde again, where are the transitional fossils? Like half whale and half whatever? Always missing something.