If you’ve ever wondered how geologists know so much about ancient beaches and shallow oceans — from the paleoenvironment to the animals roaming around, the seasonality of the weather, and even the time of day when the ancient scene was preserved — they owe it all to the sand particles bound together by microbes, forming…
New trace fossil discoveries from the half-billion-year-old Cambrian tidal flats of Wisconsin at a site called Blackberry Hill continue to paint the picture of some of the earliest animals to set foot on land and what they might have been eating. The mollusk trail Climactichnites blackberriensis (Cb) presumably stopping to eat a scyphozoan (jellyfish) that…
An assemblage of more than 700 Ediacaran fossils from the end of the Ediacaran period indicates that key animal groups — including early relatives of vertebrates — were already diversifying millions of years earlier than long believed. Reconstruction of the Jiangchuan Biota. Image credit: Xiaodong Wang. The burst of animal diversification spanning the transition from…
Paleontologists at Harvard University have described a large predatory arthropod from the Middle Cambrian of Utah featuring massive three-segmented chelicerae. Named Megachelicerax cousteaui, this soft-bodied animal represents the earliest known member of the chelicerates, pushing back the origins of spiders, scorpions, horseshoe crabs, and sea spiders by 20 million years. The surprisingly complex anatomy of…
