Credit...Chip Clark/Smithsonian
It's a few years old... March 3rd, 2014, but trilobites are even older! The New York Times has an great article called "When Trilobites Ruled the World" by Natalie Angier, who does excellent science writing on many, many subjects from geology to paleontology to genetics to neuroscience. You name it and she's written about it.
This article is all about Trilobites. What they are, when they lived, who studies them... there's even a trilobite song! Check out the article, it's a great diversion from the current shelter in place!
"The Lament for the Passing of the Trilobites" by Nigel Hughes. a professor at the University of California.
She even speaks with Carlton Brett of the University of Cincinnati, who was the keynote speaker at MAPS for the 2017 program "The Silurian Period".
Other researchers have found evidence that some trilobites were highly social, migrating long distances in a head-to-tail procession as they searched for food, or gathering together during molting season at a kind of Trilo’s Retreat, where the trilobites could simultaneously shuck off their carapaces and seek out mates.
“It looks like a lot of trilobite mating behavior happened when they were in a soft-shelled form,” said Carlton E. Brett, a professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati, who has presented research on trilobite assemblages to the Geological Society of America and elsewhere. “They did it in the nude.”
To investigate trilobite social life, Dr. Brett and his colleagues analyzed numerous examples of mass burial sites, where congregations of trilobites had been trapped in place by the sedimentary upheavals from violent sea storms, just as the residents of Pompeii were smothered in midscream by Vesuvian ash.
“You feel a little bad for the trilobites, but it’s incredible seeing these things preserved in the act of life processes,” Dr. Brett said. “It’s frozen behavior.”
