In a very unusual fossil, scientists have found one of the first examples of sexual anatomy in the fossil record: a small pair of grasping appendages that let the male trilobite hold the female close during mating.
Trilobites are perhaps the most successful group of animals ever to live. Named for their distinctive three-lobed body, these armored, pill-bug-like arthropods were some of the first hard-bodied animals on Earth. They appeared some 520 million years ago and dominated the fossil record of ancient seas for nearly 300 million years afterward. To date, paleontologists have uncovered a staggering 20,000 species, sporting every outlandish configuration of plates, spines and horns imaginable.
Reproduction in extinct animals is notoriously difficult to study, especially when it comes to invertebrates. “Understanding reproductive behavior is difficult because it doesn’t preserve easily,” says Harvard University paleontologist Sarah Losso, one of the co-authors of the recent study, which was published in Geology. Trilobites’ delicate bits, such as legs, antennae and reproductive structures, were made of soft tissues that rarely petrified.
All that changed when Losso and her colleagues took a closer look at a 508-million-year-old trilobite fossil from the famous Burgess Shale deposit in British Columbia. The species, Olenoides serratus, is about as well-known as ancient arthropods get: it makes up many of the Burgess Shale’s fossils and the genus even lends its name to a Yu-Gi-Oh fantasy game card.
A fairly common reproductive feature in marine species, claspers allow male animals to hold on to their mate as they release sperm underwater. Claspers can be found in shrimp, aquatic insects and even sharks—and, crucially, trilobites’ modern analogues, horseshoe crabs.
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