This is the "Fossil Friday" post #266. Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website. We will post any fossil pictures you send in to [email protected]. Please include a short description or story. Check the #FossilFriday Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world!
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Illustration by Jon R. Smith
Alan Keith sent us photos of his recent centipede find from Pit 11. He collected this concretion this spring on one of his trips up north from Texas. Centipedes are one of the rarest animals in the Mazon Creek fossil deposit. An estimate of occurrence for centipedes was about 3 in 287,000 concretions in the paper "Relative Abundance of Different Mazon Creek Organisms" by Gordon C. Baird and John L. Anderson, which was published in the "Richardson's Guide to The Fossil Fauna of Mazon Creek". For comparison, they found 13 spiders, 66 fish, and 107 horseshoe crabs in their survey.
This is a very beautiful Latzelia primordialis, which has been called the only true centipede in the Mazon Creek biota. Latzelia looked similar to modern day house centipedes. Described in 1890 by Samuel Hubbard Scudder, it is considered the most common centipede in Mazon Creek. It even has its own Wikipedia entry.
Latzelia is an extinct genus of scutigeromorph centipedes, and the type and only genus of the family Latzeliidae.[1] It existed during the Carboniferous in what is now Illinois (found in Mazon Creek fossil beds).[1] It was described by Samuel Hubbard Scudder in 1890, and the type species, and only known species, is Latzelia primordialis.[2] The genus name honors Austrian zoologist Robert Latzel.[3]
This centipede genus should not be confused with two invalid names applied to millipede genera: the first proposed Bollman in 1893 for a glomeridan species now in the genus Glomeridella, and the second by Verhoeff in 1895 for a genus of chordeumatidans now known as Verhoeffia.[3]
Great find, Alan! And, thanks for sharing!