Credit...Dave Rudkin
The New York Times Trilobites column has an article about predatory trilobites. While we have learned much about trilobites over the many years of study, there are some aspects of their life that we still don't know. Those unknowns are mostly associated with soft parts like the guts and delicate parts like the legs and antennae. A recent paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, looks at some of those delicate legs that have been preserved and compares them to modern animals to provide understanding as to how these animals might have lived.
Horseshoe crabs have a messy but impressive feeding style: Before chowing down on clams and other mollusks, they use their appendages around their mouths to pulverize their shells. (Imagine picking up an unshucked oyster, crushing it between your hands, and stuffing it into your mouth.)
Trilobites “look like a horseshoe crab, and they probably walked like a horseshoe crab,” said Russell Bicknell, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of New England in Australia and the lead author of the paper. He began to wonder, he said, “Did they also eat like a horseshoe crab?”
Dr. Bicknell and his co-authors studied two very different trilobite species with distinct appendage types. The first, Redlichia rex, was one of the largest known trilobites of the Cambrian Period — Frisbee-size in a world of tea saucers. It was “a walking tank,” he said. “A big, bad beastie.” Its appendages were blunt, with wedged protrusions, like the arms of a metal nutcracker.
