Hairy Museum of Natural History

Striving for fair and balanced reporting for all arthropod aficionados:

A few weeks old, but worth noting: World’s oldest flying insect fossil. A beautiful resting trace from a Carboniferous insect that landed with its limbs sprawled out like a mayfly; found in Massachusetts by a geology student at Tufts University.

Moving back in time, Chris Nedin kicks off his new Ediacaran blog with a compelling Cambrian tale of how flexible trilobites avoided unlucky breaks in The Spandrels of San Marco and the Anomalocaris Paradigm.

Speaking of the Cambrian, scientists are furthering their insight into the exceptional preservation of the famous Burgess Shale fossils, according to this article.

And  The Life of Madygen provides a brief introduction to the Triassic titanopterans, an extinct group of insects, related to grasshoppers and crickets, but with wingspans reaching half-a-meter across!

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Cambrian, Carboniferous, Invertebrates, Triassic.

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Some impressive fossils from the Chengjiang Lagerstätte in China hit the news this week—a heretofore undescribed type of Cambrian arthropod that was preserved shell-to-tail in long chains, kind of like half-billion year-old invertebrate snap-lock beads.

A photo and a closeup of the astounding Chengjiang “Chained Arthropods”
Photos by Derek Siveter from the University of Oxford Media Release.

The researchers who reported on these fossils in this week’s issue of Science suspect that these ancient “conga lines” might reflect some sort of migratory behavior.

• Reference: Hou, X.-G., Siveter, D. J., Aldridge, R. J., and Siveter, D. J. 2008. Collective Behavior in an Early Cambrian Arthropod. Science: 322: 5899, p. 224. doi: 10.1126/science.1162794
• Web Coverage:
  • University of Oxford press release
  • Science News: New Arthropod Species Really Stuck Together
  • National Geographic: “Daisy Chains” of Fossil Creatures Found in China
  • Catalogue of Organisms: Chain Chain Chain

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Cambrian, Invertebrates.

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Several interesting tidbits of paleo news have been reported this week:

First up, a fossil claw of the eurypterid (sea scorpion) Jaekelopterus rhenaniae could have come from the largest arthropod that ever lived. The claw, described in Biology Letters, measures 46 cm in length, and presumably was part of a Jaekelopterus individual 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) long. The story has been well-covered by National Geographic News, The Loom, and Palaeoblog.

This week’s issue of the journal Science has a few brief articles on research presented at last month’s Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting. One provocatively titled story, “Did Horny Young Dinosaurs Cause Illusion of Separate Species?”, reports on the work of John Horner, Mark Goodwin, and Holly Woodward, which suggests that the spiky-headed pachycephalosaurs Dracorex hogwartsia and Stygimoloch spinifer might, in fact, be juvenile forms of the knobby domehead Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis. Update (11/24): Manabu Sakamoto has a summary of Horner et al.’s presentation up at his blog, Raptor’s Nest.

Finally, researchers at the Royal Tyrrell Museum have announced the discovery of a new ceratopsian dinosaur: Eotriceratops xerinsularis (ee-oh-try-SAIR-ah-tops zeer-in-soo-LAIR-iss), the “Dawn Three-horned face from Dry Island (Buffalo Jump Provincial Park)”. This 68,000,000 year old dinosaur is a couple of million years older than Triceratops, and it may be the ancestor of that well-known genus. Eotriceratops and Triceratops shared several features such as large brow horns and a solid frill, but Eotriceratops also possessed some more primitive characteristics than its younger relative, according to this story in the Edmonton Journal. The three-meter-long skull of Eotriceratops (reconstructed in this photo) would seem to put it in the running for the largest head of any terrestrial animal, alongside other ceratopsian contenders such as Torosaurus and Pentaceratops.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Cretaceous, Devonian, Dinosaurs, Invertebrates, Recent Discoveries.

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BBC News was the first to report on three new species of sea spider from the Jurassic-aged fossil beds at La Voulte-sur-Rhône in southern France. Be sure to flip through this slideshow of the specimens: guaranteed to be the most beautifully creepy fossils you’ll see all day.

Further Reading:

Charbonnier, S., Vannier, J., and Riou, B. New sea spiders from the Jurassic La Voulte-sur-Rhône Lagerstätte. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Published online. doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.0848

A hi-res image of three of the fossils is available here.

National Geographic News has the story, as does Afarensis.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Invertebrates, Jurassic, Recent Discoveries.

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