The trilobites were blind, so they may have used their spiny body projections to keep in touch with one another as they moved along in a queue. (Image credit: Jean Vannier)
LiveScience has a piece on a new trilobite discovery in Morocco. Morocco is famous for fossils and one particularly notable animal from there is the trilobite. In this case, a whole line of these animals died and were preserved together in line. Behavior is rarely fossilized, but this window into the past, shows collective behavior is not as new and novel as was previous thought. These Ordovician trilobites, Ampyx priscus, were described in a paper in the journal Scientific Reports.
The trilobites go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah … well, at least they did, some 480 million years ago.
New fossils from Morocco show lines of trilobites in orderly queues, likely buried by a storm as they trekked from one place to another under the Ordovician seas in an ancient game of "follow the leader."
"I think people think that collective behavior is something new in the course of evolution, but actually sophisticated behavior started very, very early," said study leader Jean Vannier, a paleontologist at the University of Lyon in France.
