For those interested, here’s an ostracod:
It’s typically 1mm large nowadays. Perhaps bigger, perhaps smaller back then.
So, after tens of thousands of trilobite fossils, we finally have one with food inside of it. Yet it seems to be from a species that had a bizarre feeding pattern, and this particular individual may have been sucking down more food than usual.
It’s bizarre, indeed. For comparison: imagine that some non-human civilisation, 200 million years in the future, discovered lots and lots of mammal fossils. Those fossils include modern humans and mice, a giant sloth, a mammoth, plus a lot more things; they date as back as the time when those fucking teethed flightless birds (dinos) still existed to today. But “they’re all mammals, they all look the same”. And the only fossil where you can actually identify “what a mammal eats” would be from… a bloodsucking bat. And now the non-human civilisation is wondering where the fuck “the mammals” got so much blood from.
In large part that’s what “we” do with the trilobites. The class existed for 270 millions of years, and their fossils are so common because there was a fucking lot of them. They were likely as diverse among themselves as we mammals are. But the one trilobite that we found with food inside happened to have a weird diet.
I was also wondering if the amount of shelled creatures they found in the digestive tract isn’t a little survivor bias. Not that I know anything about this, but it seems like shells would take longer to digest and would remain in the digestive tract long after softer foods. Also that shells would take better to fossilization.
Are you telling me that the coffee and banana I had for breakfast wouldn’t be preserved if I was fossilized?
That’s a fair point - softer tissue would quickly dissolve.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In addition to capturing much of its external anatomy in exquisite detail, the researchers were able to image its interior using radiation from a synchrotron, a type of circular particle accelerator.
Running down the center of the animal’s interior was a line of material composed primarily of small pieces of shells.
While there are three clusters of material along the track, smaller bits of shell are present between them, providing an outline of the entire digestive tract.
There are also fragments of thin shells that probably were derived from shellfish like clams and mussels, as well as some pieces of an echinoderm (think starfish and sea urchins).
(In case you were curious as to how scientists describe pooping in papers, that’s phrased as something that “may represent a further adaptation, allowing the passage of large undigested particles through the anal opening.”)
This would require an acidic environment and would have liberated lots of calcium, which can pose challenges to animals where muscle contractions are calcium-driven.
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