SciNews has a piece about a new species of trilobites from Tasmania. A new species of the genus Gravicalymene has been named. It's called Gravicalymene bakeri after the actor Thomas Stewart Baker, the fourth actor to play the title character in the television series "Doctor Who". This animal lived about 450 million years ago during the late Ordovician Period. This animal is very similar to the many Calymenid species across Europe and North America from the Ordovician through the Devonian Periods. All the details are in a paper that appeared in the journal Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology.
Gravicalymene is a small genus of calymenid trilobites that flourished from the Ordovician to the Devonian period.
It includes at least seven species and is relatively well-known from the ancient continents of Avalonia, Baltica and Laurentia (i.e., Europe and North America).
The newly-discovered species, named Gravicalymene bakeri, lived during the Late Ordovician epoch, approximately 450 million years ago.
“During this time, Australia was part of the great landmass Gondwana, when complex marine ecosystems were starting to develop,” said Dr. Patrick Smith from the Australian Museum Research Institute and Macquarie University and Dr. Malte Ebach from the University of New South Wales.
“It was also a time when the first primitive plants were appearing on land.”
Several specimens of Gravicalymene bakeri were collected from the Late Ordovician shales of the Gordon Group in northern Tasmania.
“This is the first record of the genus Gravicalymene from the Ordovician of East Gondwana (Australasia),” the paleontologists said.