A trilobite found with a full stomach

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/09/we-finally-know-for-sure-what-a-trilobite-ate/

by isaacfrond • 3 years ago

107 50 3 years ago

yxhuvud• 3 years ago

I threw the article on our local paleontologist in the team and he claims the food of trilobites have been know for like 20 years or so, but that the new thing here is that some team got funds to do a synchroton study, which apparently costs a lot and hence the results needs to be sold as impressive to motivate it.

zimpenfish• 3 years ago

From the article, "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". You could make a pretty good guess what I eat from the food in this flat but unless you found it in my stomach, you couldn't sure, no?

tetris11• 3 years ago

"As inferred from the items scattered around the specimen, we theorize that early post-agriculture hominids subsisted on a thin diet of mechanical keyboard letters and magnetic disks."

junon• 3 years ago

That explains why the article is bottom up. I'm so tired of "journalism" now being bait and switch.

The interesting bait is at the top, then there's ten pages of stuff that has nothing to do with the bait - of course, filled with inline ads. Then finally comes two paragraphs of the stuff you actually wanted to know.

lagniappe• 3 years ago

there's ten pages of stuff that has nothing to do with the bait

Get the Germans in here, there has to be a word for this

dekhn2• 3 years ago

The abstract directly states "Inferred trophic roles range from detritivores to predators, but all are based on indirect evidence such as body and gut morphology, modes of preservation and attributed feeding traces; no trilobite specimen with internal gut contents has been described [3,4]."

Can your local paleontologist give you a single citation showing direct inspection of a trilobite gut? Because the way you wrote it, you just said "the food of trilobytes have been known for 20 years or so". That doesn't contradict what the authors say, but rather, ignores the fact that this is the first direct, physical evidence in the gut of a fossil. That kind of data is generally weighted much higher than any indirect evidence (which I think is what was available before).

I don't argue that scientists juice their studies to get attention/justify the funding, but I think your criticism is probably missing the literal truth of the statement (and if you show me a single cite disproving their statement, I'm happy to change my mind).

Ylpertnodi• 3 years ago

Maybe that's not what they ate, but what kills them if ingested.

quietpain• 3 years ago

Finland isn’t the happiest country in the world, they’re the most sarcastic when filling out a survey.

anothernewdude• 3 years ago

Different cultures have different ideas of what constitutes happiness, so comparing self-ratings on happiness is worthless.

hasmanean• 3 years ago

Or maybe they’re the least sarcastic. Every other country in the world has people who just say “yeah life sucks” while enjoying themselves fully.

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

Survivor bias. Of sorts!

D-Coder• 3 years ago

As it appears to have been throughout their entire digestive tract, we can at least conclude that it didn't kill them quickly...

max_• 3 years ago

One of the hobbies I wanted to get into was amateur fossil hunting.

Unfortunately I really don't know we're to start, what equipment to use or basic knowledge on what exactly to look for. Any I would be grateful for any recommendations.

I some how thought trilobites would be easy to find though.

teruakohatu• 3 years ago

The good news is that it is not a hard hobby to get into.

Equipment recommended is geologist's hammer/rock hammer (this is a combination pick and hammer) and safety glasses. A stone/mason chisel with a hand guard is also a good investment.

In places where there are a lot of fossils you don't even need that! The ground can be littered with them.

Where in the world are you located?

Trilobites are very rare where I live, to the point that any find would be of huge acedemic interest. Dinosaurs are so rare that locations of finds are kept secret by the government.

On the other hand North Africa seems to have an abundance are ridiculously well preserved trilobites.

You are welcome to email me, see my profile, I would be more than happy to help you find a location to search for fossils.

bluGill• 3 years ago

All you need is legal access to limestone. (other stone works as well, but limestone as basically fossils so it is easy to find fossils in it, and limestone is common) Where I live there are places where limestone always has been right on the surface not covered by topsoil, and other places where you need to dig down many meters (potentially dangerous). I know of public parks where you are allowed to dig up any fossils you can find.

ravenousgeek• 3 years ago

For the tools and equipment needed I have found this video very helpful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5NFdIj17ro

Fossil Forum has fossil sites sorted by country (might have to create an account to view) http://www.thefossilforum.com/forum/88-fossil-sites/

bell-cot• 3 years ago

Title says "know for sure", but the article is loaded with not-so-little disclaimers. "Trilobite" is a broad biological Class ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_(biology) ) - not a more-specific Order, Family, or Genus. Let alone a Species. The n=1 fossil trilobite here is from a "rare" species. It may have been gorging on garbage, to help with the molt it was part-way through. Or it could have been behaving abnormally due to disease, or starving due a shortage of its normal food, or ...

yashasolutions• 3 years ago

well technically it says "a" trilobite, so it's not entirely lying, it is indeed "a" trilobite

standardUser• 3 years ago

"we've described over 20,000 different trilobite species"

and

"Most of them appeared to be ostracods... there are 13,000 existing ostracod species."

The sheer quantity of fossils and/or specimens to build out those lists of tens of thousands of species is mind boggling. I known there has been a shift from traditional species classification to a model based on genetics (cladistics). Has this changed the definition of what is considered a species? For example, can we assume that none of these 20,000 trilobite species could reliably procreate with one another?

stvltvs• 3 years ago

I get the impression that no single method (genetics, morphology, ecology, geography, etc.) trumps the others in taxonomy. For example, Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis interbred successfully and yet are separate species.

gdprrrr• 3 years ago

I think some consider it a subspecies Homo sapiens neanderthalensis

BurningFrog2• 3 years ago

There is no clear definition of "species".

RetroTechie• 3 years ago

Given how long trilobites were around, and geographical distribution, there could be significant time and/or space distance between any specimens found.

Not saying they couldn't interbreed though. You'd have to ask an expert.

thaumasiotes4• 3 years ago

If we found the remains of a human with a full stomach, how much would that teach us about "what humans ate"?

burnished• 3 years ago

What? Clearly you'd learn a lot if you were otherwise not familiar with humans and only had fossil records to work off of.

Ensorceled2• 3 years ago

Last night, my stomach was full of pork tenderloin, green beans and roasted sweet potato with butter and a bit of parm, washed down with a radler.

My stomach would have been VERY informative, should have fossilized myself.

thaumasiotes4• 3 years ago

How many of those things are eaten by a majority of humans?

My instinct says "the pork is a maybe".

With no grain in your meal, you're more misleading than informative.

LinuxBender• 3 years ago

My stomach had eggs, guacamole, oregano oil, thyme oil, clove oil, ginger root, aged garlic extract, charcoal, bentonite clay, diatomaceous earth, glycine, cranberry concentrate, berberine, calcium lactate and taurine. That pork tenderloin sounds good though.

bregma• 3 years ago

We know what neolithic European peoples ate by analyzing Otzi's stomach contents. It's a thing that has been done.

thaumasiotes4• 3 years ago

No it isn't. You know what Otzi ate one day. It was probably fairly representative of his local geographic region. It was most certainly not representative of neolithic Europe.

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

I’d love to know what trilobite tasted like with pasta, fried in garlic and butter and fresh parsley.

pvaldes3• 3 years ago

It tasted like a mouthful of clam shells probably

Removing the stomach part, and having in mind that some of the body parts were ravaged by scavengers (so that parts weren't poisonous), I would assume that the taste would remind us to other grazing arthropods like crustaceans.

I assume that this was an entire animal found in two parts and not an empty moult filled with random debris from thanatocenose. Those tiny jumping beans called ostracods fossilize easily and can sink and accumulate by thousands but would be not so convenient to catch alive one by one. They are very hard, relatively fast, and often difficult to swallow (many have strong spines).

I would suggest to take an external sample of the rock matrix to use it as a control group. Thus we can check if the same species appear inside and outside the trilobite and if they do it at the same concentration. If is a yes, then this could be also thanatocenose accumulated in a hollowed dead trilobite and the claims that trilobites can't digest calcium should be taken with a pinch of marine salt.

AdamWynne• 3 years ago

Just our luck: the one vegan Trilobite

dml2135• 3 years ago

we've described over 20,000 different trilobite species. That's over three times the number of mammalian species we're aware of.

Is this actually true? Only 6,666 identified mammalian species, over past and present, seems way too low.

Edit: Well google answered my question, it seems like this number is correct. I guess I just always assumed that mammals were as diverse as other orders, but given their place in the food chain it makes sense that there would be a lot less.

polonbike• 3 years ago

A quick google/wiki/kagi/... search will shown that we know around 6400 mammal species, so the approximation is actually quite on point here

pixl97• 3 years ago

Mammals are 'mostly' land animals. It's much more difficult to create fossils land than it is in the ocean.

In addition mammals have always existed in a world with other competing species. For the longest time trilobites were competing with themselves.

pvaldes3• 3 years ago

yes, mammals are scarce (and a good chunk of the megafauna is extinct). Birds and, most of all, fishes are the real vertebrate winners. Our impact is what made us important

On the other hand, we are discovering a lot of new species lately.

chromoblob• 3 years ago

trilo bitten food

Iwan-Zotow• 3 years ago

Le Big Mac?

A trilobite found with a full stomach

Related Stories