Media release
From: Springer NatureWhat the trilobites ate for dinner
The discovery of a 465-million-year-old trilobite with preserved gut contents is reported in this week’s Nature. The finding sheds light on the feeding habits and lifestyle of one of the most common and well-known fossil arthropods.
More than 20,000 species of trilobite lived during their 270-million-year history, which spanned from the early Cambrian to the end-Permian period (around 541–252 million years ago). Despite numerous fossil specimens, the feeding habits of these animals have had to be inferred indirectly, because no known fossil specimens with internal gut contents have previously been reported.
Petr Kraft, Per E. Ahlberg and colleagues describe a fossil trilobite (Bohemolichas incola) dated to around 465 million years ago, from the Middle Ordovician of what is now the Czech Republic, with a tightly packed gut full of fragmented shells that belonged to marine creatures including ostracods, hyoliths, bivalves and stylophoran echinoderms. The authors propose that Bohemolichas incola was an opportunistic scavenger. It was a light crusher and a chance feeder that ate dead or living animals, which either disintegrated easily or were small enough to be swallowed whole.
After death, this scavenger became scavenged. The fossil specimen also shows the vertical tracks of other scavengers that burrowed into the trilobite’s carcass, where they targeted the soft tissue but avoided the gut. This implies noxious conditions inside the trilobite’s digestive system and possible ongoing enzymatic activity.
