Saturday, August 09, 2014

Catalog of Organisms on Bobble-nosed Trilobites

While most fossil invertebrates manage to completely fly under the radar when it comes to popular culture (it's not as if we're drowning under cartoon depictions of euthycarcinoids or eldoniids), one group that will often get a passing nod is the trilobites. Any depiction of early animal life worth its salt is going to feature a couple of these crunchy bugs scurrying about. Nevertheless, the range of varieties of trilobite shown will generally be low, and will usually be something similar to Olenellus or Elrathia. Seeing as trilobites persisted for hundreds of millions of years, it should be no surprise that their actual diversity was much higher.

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