We Finally Know for Sure What a Trilobite Ate
mrpg writes:
We finally know for sure what a trilobite ate
Trilobites first appear early in the Cambrian and are one of the earliest examples of arthropods, the group that includes all insects. They flourished for over 100 million years, leaving fossils that are seemingly ubiquitous-we've described over 20,000 different trilobite species. That's over three times the number of mammalian species we're aware of.
Despite all those fossils, however, we've never found one with a meal inside it. We've been able to infer what some of them were likely to have been dining on based on their appearance and the ecosystems they were found in, but we haven't been able to establish what they ate with certainty. But today, researchers are describing an exquisitely preserved sample that includes several of the animal's last meals, which suggests that this particular animal was a bit like an aquatic vacuum cleaner.
[...] The one caution the researchers raise about this find is that the feeding behavior of the trilobite may not be entirely normal. There's a discontinuity in the animal's shell between two of its segments, which can be an indication that it's getting ready to molt. If that's the case, the animal may have been overeating to generate additional pressure to help it break out of its old shell.
So, after tens of thousands of trilobite fossils, we finally have one with food inside of it. Yet it seems to be from a species that had a bizarre feeding pattern, and this particular individual may have been sucking down more food than usual. So, we'll probably need to find a few more of these to get a better picture of what trilobites ate.
Journal Reference:
Petr Kraft, Valeria Vakaninova, Michal Mergl, et al.Uniquely preserved gut contents illuminate trilobite palaeophysiologyNature (2023).(DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06567-7)
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