Scientists reveal half-billion-year-old ‘last supper’

About 465 million years ago, an armored critter resembling a sea roach died near what is now Prague. The final meal of this animal—a trilobite—still sat in its guts as sediment buried its body in the sea floor of an ancient Paleozoic sea. There, it remained entombed for ages. Now, scientific sleuths have deduced the contents of this meal, providing the first direct evidence of the diet and lifestyle of this primal and iconic group of arthropods. A private collector first discovered the trilobite fossil more than a century ago—or at least the small sphere of ancient sediment that contained it. Such balls, called siliceous nodules or “Rokycany Balls,” are weathered out of the shales of the Šárka Formation. The rock deposit—famed for its fossils—is all that remains of an ancient sea that once covered the Prague Basin in the Czech Republic. The nodules formed when sediment hardened very quickly around animals at very shallow depths. The process, similar to how amber trapped animals millions of years ago, froze organisms in time, keeping their 3D structure nearly intact. When the nodule was cracked open, an exquisite, fossilized specimen of the trilobite Bohemolichas incola emerged. The fossil eventually made its way to the Dr.  Bohuslav Horák Museum, where Petr Kraft—now a paleontologist at Charles University—saw it for the first time as a little boy. “His whole life, he kept coming back to this specimen,” says Valéria Vaškaninov...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news