[HN Gopher] Trilobites killed by volcanic ash
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Trilobites killed by volcanic ash
Author : geox
Score : 134 points
Date : 2024-06-29 22:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bristol.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bristol.ac.uk)
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> Palaeontologists have described more than 20,000 species of
| trilobites, ranging in body length from less than two millimetres
| to more than 90 centimetres._
|
| The trilobite.info site has lots of drawings of all the different
| trilobites that have been described: https://www.trilobites.info/
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I love the design of that website.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| I didn't design it but my HTML 3.0 skills from the 90s could
| have. That being said, it's not laden with ads and is fairly
| easy to navigate which is pretty nice. The mobile view looks
| like a desktop version scrunched into my phone but is still
| alright, I guess.
|
| What do you like about the design?
| raytopia wrote:
| I like how it feels unique and themes itself around the
| content it contains. Instead of just being yet another
| website with a flat simple design. We need more websites
| like this.
| swatcoder wrote:
| I like that it's unassuming and content-driven. It doesn't
| communicate an aspiration to be a design object or project
| focus group assumptions about user experience.
|
| It just presents a lot of information and makes that
| information appropriately navigable. The lack of trendy
| design language makes me believe that the operator knows
| and cares about the subject matter itself, which I find
| reassuring and refreshing in a world that's become
| saturated in blogspam, SEO, subscription sales, and ad
| engagement.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Authenticity.
| accrual wrote:
| Gives me nostalgia for learning about random subjects on
| the early web, pre-Wikipedia. Stumbling upon a site like
| this would be a treasure trove if you were interested in
| these back in the day.
| canjobear wrote:
| The website itself is like a fossil.
| perilunar wrote:
| Straight out of 1990s!
|
| Many of the pages have: <meta
| name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.7 [en]C-CCK-MCD NSCPCD47
| (Win95; I) [Netscape]">
|
| which would place them around 1999.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| > trilobites.info
|
| Damn this website is amazing!
| ironSkillet wrote:
| I love finding old internet style websites like this. Simple,
| fast, packed full of information.
| hbbio wrote:
| This comes from the same researcher that was featured in the
| Nature cover in 2010 for showing that multicellular organisms
| were way older than originally thought (at least 2.1b years ago):
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09166
|
| (remember reading that one back then...)
| webwielder2 wrote:
| It's just amazing that fossils even exist. Thanks, random natural
| events and processes for showing us what the freakin' distant
| past looked like!
| imoverclocked wrote:
| We even have a record of ancient Earth's magnetic fields :) The
| geological record is pretty amazing indeed!
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| How is magnetic field history figured out?
| BWStearns wrote:
| Basalt on the ocean floor records the magnetic field of the
| earth from when it cooled. Since it radiates out from
| midoceanic rifts and the rate of its creation is known, we
| can use it as a diary of the magnetic field. Iirc we first
| figured it out during WW2 doing magnetic bathyometry to
| help ships navigate.
| CalRobert wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remanence can get you
| started!
|
| I did horribly in this lab session in college but it was
| still fun.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| There must have been a whole shitload of the little bugs. We've
| found so many of their fossils, that they are a commodity.
|
| For each fossil, there's probably a thousand individuals that
| never got rocked.
| CasperH2O wrote:
| > The 'Pompei' trilobites are so remarkable because they are not
| flattened or deformed like many fossils and every leg is arranged
| as it was in life
|
| Going from a 2D image to 3D must be really quite something!
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Curious. I believed trilobites have just evolved into "horseshoe
| crabs".
| pvaldes wrote:
| Is easy to identify them as that, but Arachnids and antennas
| are incompatible and Chelicerata (like horseshoe crabs) is the
| only group bearing chelicera. Crustaceans have two pairs of
| antennas and different shaped legs. Insects are (almost) non
| marine (a few notorious exceptions). Millipedes were never
| found on the sea and the head appendix were placed in different
| segments.
|
| But the new info about the mouth parts is extraordinary and
| could still lead to big discoveries and earthquakes in
| taxonomy. The problem with this animals is that all the mouth
| pieces that fossilized were from different types or in
| different positions compared with all arthropods alive or
| extinct that were not trilobites.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _The new specimens, which were killed and fossilised quickly
| when volcanic ash smothered them underwater more than 500
| million years ago, show details never before seen in any
| trilobite..._
|
| First sentence of TFA.
|
| This is not a claim that _all_ trilobites were made extinct by
| volcanic ash, but that _these fossils_ were the result of an
| ashfall, by which previously unavailable anatomical detail was
| preserved. The headline is misleading, but even the shallowest
| read of the article would have mooted your speculation.
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(page generated 2024-06-30 23:02 UTC)