Trilobite Mass Burials

This is a fairly old news story but I wanted to cover it anyway because I love Trilobites, and I know that im not the only one. To me they are one of the most fascinating and amazing creatures ever to have lived. No one who has had a chance to read about these little critters can argue otherwise. One of the big success stories in the history of life on our planet, these early arthropods were found in oceans all over the world in many shapes and forms. They first appear in the fossil record around 526 million years ago and spent the next 270  million years thriving in the planets early oceans until they finally met their end at the hands of the mass dying known to us today as the Permain-Triassic extinction even.

The article talks about how Carlton E. Brett, University of Cincinnati professor of geology, with two colleagues Adrian Kin of Poland's Institute of Geological Sciences at Jagiellonian University, and Brenda Hunda of the Cincinnati Museum Centre presented a co-authored paper on the findings of their research on trilobite death beds. Im sure this paper is incredibly interesting and I would love to get my hands on it!

It covers the findings made by Brett across a couple of these mass burials of trilobites that seem to be caused by violent storms that carry large amounts of sediment which buried them in the blink of an eye, perfectly preserving them and the environment they inhabited. These large groups of trilobites, just like their modern anthropod counterparts, seem to gather en masse to shed their old exoskeletons to find safety in numbers. The fact that most specimens are of the same size, suggesting they are around the same age, means that its more than likely they used this opportunity to mate. This seems to be a very effective way of doing it since the behaviour has essentially stayed the same for 520million years amongst some arthropods.

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That concludes the first news item of Palaeocast. It wasnt the best, I know, but I really wanted to put something up on the launch day and I didnt have the time needed to properly research to find a really great story (turns out 45minutes isnt quite enough to write something interesting, especially not at 1am on a tuesday night). I promise to get you all a couple of great articles in the next couple of days. There should be a link to the article, if not I will add one first thing in the morning. Thank you and Goodnight!

/Henrik