HENRY WOODS, M.A.
St. John’s College, Cambridge, University Lecturer in Palaeozoology
CHAPTER VIII
TRILOBITA
Among the many interesting groups of fossils found in the Palaeozoic deposits there is none which has attracted more attention than the Trilobites. As early as 1698, Edward Lhwyd, Curator of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, recorded in the Philosophical Transactions the discovery of Trilobites in the neighbourhood of Llandeilo in South Wales; and of one of his specimens he remarked that “it must be the Sceleton of a flat Fish.” In the following year the same writer gave in his Lithophylacii Britannici Ichnographia descriptions and figures of two Trilobites which are evidently examples of the species now known as Ogygia buchi and Trinucleus fimbriatus.
Although Trilobites differ so much from living Arthropods that it was difficult to determine even whether they belonged to the Crustacea or the Arachnida, yet one of the earliest writers, Dr. Cromwell Mortimer, Secretary of the Royal Society (1753), recognised their resemblance to Apus (see pp. [19]–36). This view of their affinities was adopted by Linnaeus, and has been supported by many later writers. Another early author, Emanuel Mendez da Costa, thought that the Trilobites were related to the Isopods, an opinion which has been held by some few zoologists of more recent times.
The Trilobites form the only known Order of the Crustacea which has no living representatives. They are found in the oldest known fossiliferous deposits—the Lower Cambrian or Olenellus beds, where they are represented by 19 genera belonging to the families Agnostidae, Paradoxidae, Olenidae, and Conocephalidae. From the variety of forms found and the state of development which they have reached, it is evident that even at that remote period the group must have been of considerable antiquity; but of its pre-Cambrian ancestors nothing is yet known; consequently there is no direct evidence of the origin of the group.
Trilobites form an important part of all the faunas of the Cambrian system; they attain their greatest development in the Ordovician period, after which they become less numerous; their decline is very marked in the Devonian, in which nearly all the genera are but survivals from the Silurian period; in the Carboniferous, evidence of approaching extinction is seen in the small number of genera represented, all of which belong to one family—the Proëtidae, in the relatively few species in each genus and in the small size of the individuals of those species. In Europe no representatives of the group appear to have survived the Carboniferous period, but in America one form has been recorded from deposits of Permian age.
Trilobites seem to have been exclusively marine, since they are found only in association with the remains of marine animals. Their range in depth was evidently considerable, for they occur in many different kinds of sediment, and were apparently able to live regardless of the nature of the sea-floor—whether muddy, sandy, calcareous, or rocky. In some cases they occur in deposits containing reef-building corals and other shallow water animals; in others they are associated with organisms which lived at greater depths. The group appears to have had a world-wide distribution, for the remains of Trilobites are found in the Palaeozoic rocks of all countries. Their range in size is considerable; for whilst a large proportion of the species are about two or three inches in length, some, like Agnostus, are only a quarter of an inch long, others are from ten to twenty inches long, the largest forms including species of Paradoxides, Asaphus, Megalaspis, Lichas, and Homalonotus.
The feature in a Trilobite which first attracts attention is the marked division of the dorso-ventrally flattened body into a median or axial part, and a lateral or pleural part on each side. It was this character that led Walch, in 1771, to give the name by which the group is now known. The axial part of the body contained the alimentary canal, as is shown by the position of the mouth and anus, as well as by casts in mud of the canal which are found in some specimens. The trilobation of the body is quite distinct in the majority of Trilobites, but in a few genera belonging to the Asaphidae and Calymenidae (Fig. [136]) it becomes more or less completely obsolete.
