A team of researchers has discovered a new species of arthropod, related to modern-day spiders or scorpions, that dates back 450 million years and was perfectly preserved in a gold-like material in New York State.
This type of conservation is due to the material in which it was found, iron pyrite, also known as ‘fool’s gold’, which was “filling” or occupying the different parts of the body of the dead animal and trapped in a sediment at the point to give the feeling that he was embalmed in gold.
The fossil was found at a site in New York State known as the ‘Beecher Trilobite Bed’, in which there is a large representation of fossil organisms in perfect condition because the iron pyrite maintained the shape of their bodies after they were buried in the sediment, giving origin of spectacular three-dimensional golden fossils.
The discovery was described on Tuesday in the journal Current Biology, where the new species is called ‘Lomankus edgecombei’, in honor of Greg Edgecombe, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London considered one of the world’s leading arthropod experts.
“In addition to the beautiful and striking golden color, these fossils are spectacularly preserved, it seems that when washing the rock they are in they would come to life and escape”, highlighted one of the authors, Luke Parry, researcher at the British University of Oxford.
The new fossil belongs to a group of arthropods called ‘megacheirans’, which are characterized by having a large leg or appendage on the front of the body to capture their prey.
The researchers stress that ‘megacheirans’ like Lomankus were very diverse during the Cambrian (between 538 and 485 million years ago), but went extinct in the Ordovician period (between 485 and 443 million years ago).
The fossil offers valuable clues to better understand how arthropods developed these frontal appendages to control their environment and capture prey, until they became what we know today as the antennae of insects and crustaceans, and the pincers and fangs of spiders and scorpions.
“Today, there are more species of arthropods than any other group of animals on Earth, and part of the key to their evolutionary success is their highly adaptable head and appendages,” Parry added.
While other megacheirans used their first large appendage to capture prey, in Lomankus the typical claws are much smaller.
This suggests that the animal used its frontal appendage to perceive its surroundings rather than capture prey, so its lifestyle would have been very different to that of its older relatives from the Cambrian period.
In fact, the fossil appears to have no eyes, so the frontal appendage would have been essential for searching for food in the dark, low-oxygen environment in which it lived.
Leave a Reply