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In a quest that has taken him from Oklahoma to Morocco and Poland, Brett has analyzed multiple examples of mass trilobite burial. A smothering death by tons of hurricane-generated storm sediment was so rapid that the trilobites are preserved in life position. These geologic "snapshots" record behavior in much the way that ancient Roman life was recorded at Pompeii by volcanic ash. Burial was rapid, Brett said, but also somewhat delicate. Trilobites, like other arthropods, shed their hard exoskeletons from time to time. "We find molted pieces lying immediately adjacent to each other," he said. "This is proof that the...

I'm getting tired of this urban legend that Meister found human footprints with fossils. Stuff like this embarasses Christians and hurts intelligent design: **** (C) Glen J. Kuban, 1998 - 2005 According to Dr. Melvin Cook (1970), a local rockhound named William J. Meister was hunting for trilobite fossils along a hillside near Antelope Springs, Utah in 1968 when he broke open a slab and discovered a curious oblong marking that he took for a human sandal print. This was quite surprising, since the rock at this locality is identified as the middle Cambrian Wheeler Formation--over 500 million years old....

New research from an international team of scientists is suggesting that instantly recognizable earthy smell after rain is released by bacteria trying to attract a particular arthropod as a way to spread its spores. The smell is a 500-million-year-old example of chemical communication, evolved to help a particular type of bacteria spread. Scientists have long been fascinated by the unique odor that appears when it rains. The scent is particularly prominent when the first rains of a season hit dry soil. Two Australian researchers named the odor petrichor, after an influential study in the 1960s suggested a particular oil is...

German researcher Peter Jäger revealed earlier today that he's named a new Malaysian species of spider after David Bowie – the fetchingly titled Heteropoda Davidbowie. But what other animals have been named after famous music stars?

These weird creatures were found in an abandoned foundation pit in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

In a stunning example of evolution at work, scientists have now found that changes in a single gene can produce major changes in the skeletal armor of fish living in the wild. The surprising results, announced in the March 25, 2005, issue of journal Science, bring new data to long-standing debates about how evolution occurs in natural habitats. “Our motivation is to try to understand how new animal types evolve in nature,” said molecular geneticist David M. Kingsley, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “People have been interested in whether a few genes...

HORNY male trilobites may have been fighting it out over the females hundreds of millions of years ago, making them the earliest combatants known to take part in such sexual contests. Rob Knell, a biologist at Queen Mary University of London and Richard Fortey of London's Natural History Museum noticed that some of the trilobites in the museum's collection had horns on their heads similar to those of modern beetles. Male beetles use their horns to battle each other for supremacy, with the winner getting the opportunity to mate. Knell and Fortey wondered if the trilobites used their horns for...

A DEVASTATING burst of gamma-rays may have caused one of Earth's worst mass extinctions, 443 million years ago. A team of astrophysicists and palaeontologists says the pattern of trilobite extinctions at that time resembles the expected effects of a nearby gamma-ray burst (GRB). Although other experts have greeted the idea with some scepticism, most agree that it deserves further investigation. GRBs are the most powerful explosions known. As giant stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives, they fire incredibly intense pulses of gamma rays from their poles that can be detected even from across the universe...

Trilobites are one of the most popular fossils for collectors and are found all over the world. The Ute Indians used one species as an amulet, and there is even a cave in France called the Grotte du Trilobite that contained a relic made out of one of these extinct marine creatures.1,2 Trilobites are members of the phylum Arthropoda, which includes spiders, insects, and crustaceans. Today, members of this group make up at least 85 percent of the species on Earth and live in every environment. Insects alone account for over 870,000 of these species.1 God designed all arthropods with...