A mysterious, prehistoric marine creature has spilled its guts. For the first time, scientists have unearthed a fossilized trilobite whose final meals were preserved within its digestive system.
Paleontologist Valéria Vaškaninová and colleagues discovered the partially digested meals when they looked at a high-resolution 3-D scan of Bohemolichas incola, a previously known but relatively rare trilobite species that lived 465 million years ago. The contents include fragments of thin-walled shells, bits of echinoderms (a group that includes modern-day sea urchins and starfish), and other bottom-dwellers small enough to be swallowed whole, the researchers report online September 27 in Nature.
Many of the more than 20,000 described species of
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