Trilobites - Fossil and Anecdotes



Some time back I had this hobby of collecting rocks precious stones mostly; like this wonderful purple cluster of amethyst, and this cluster of quartz that has collected dust over the years. Now these stones come in many pretty shapes and sizes, but my favorite has to go to this; a fossil of a trilobite. This ancient arthropod, now cast in stone, is part of a very diverse and successful group, that  dominated this Earth for millions of years; all the way from the Cambrian explosion to the Permian mass extinction, just before the Triassic period.

10 to 8 years ago, I obsessed over these guys and they were quite interesting. Now there have been no trilobites since before even the dinosaurs came, so what we have left is the fossil record which preserves just their exoskeleton. And while we know their morphology well from this, we know very little about their behaviors their viscera and even their coloration. Those details cannot be reflected in the fossil record, and so are lost to history. Nonetheless there are some nice things that have been preserved in the fossil record; like how this one has spines, and how this one has more spines, and how this one has even more spines. These spines were of course for defense as trilobites did have predators...and also they prayed on stuff as well. Some trilobite spines look really really weird. 

This one has a trident coming out of its glabellum, and apparently it's a sensory organ of some sort ... quite elegant. And while most trilobites are blind, some of them actually had eyes and not just eyes - compound eyes. It's amazing how not so long after the Cambrian explosion, where multicellular animal life just began, that some of these guys were able to evolve such complex apparatuses for seeing the world outside. Some of these guys even had their eyes on stalks, which is quite interesting. Look at how cute this one is.. like a snail. Trilobites can be real small or like Paradoxides here really large. Paradoxides is 30 cm long, so it's really huge they actually look kind of like horseshoe crabs, which is not surprising because horseshoe crabs are really really ancient. These guys lived on this Earth since the early Ordovician and are really really weird; they are not even Crustaceans, they chelicerates - most similar to arachnids. These guys are living fossils and they come to the beach to mate like this, so trilobites are possibly the same. 

They have a special blue blood that clots literally instantly and in the medical field there's something called LAL which is extracted from this blood which is very useful. We literally make a hole in their heart to extract this industrially, and they're fine after this! Being somewhat related to this, trilobites may have had similar properties. The fossil record is no way complete and reflective of the true diversity, but what we have is pretty good and we can use it really nicely to speculate of what about what they could have been.

Horseshoe crabs saw the dinosaurs come and go, but these guys didn't make it past the Permian. What we have left are the fossils, and from these fossils we can say - trilobites were cute.


Achinthya Nanayakkara 

22.03.2025

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