Samplings: May 2009

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Schinderhannes bartelsi fossil

 

Photo: Georg Oleschinski; Drawing: Dr. Elke Gröning (TU Clauthal)

While cutting slate for roof shingles in the 1990s, a German quarry worker spotted a four-inch fossil embedded in one of the slabs. His sharp-eyed discovery has enabled paleontologists to fill a major gap in the evolution of early arthropods, says Gabriele Kühl, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bonn. With her professor, Jes Rust, and Derek E. G. Briggs of Yale, she analyzed the new fossil. Schinderhannes bartelsi, as the team named the specimen, represents a new marine genus and species that lived in the Early Devonian epoch, some 400 million years ago. On its head, the specimen bears a pair of “great” appendages—spiny, segmented projections—that probably helped it wrangle food.

Until now, paleontologists had thought such great-appendage arthropods died out about 100 million years earlier. They’re thought to share a common ancestor with scorpions and horseshoe crabs, whose pincers evolved from ancestral appendages.

From its deadly looking appendages and large eyes, S. bartelsi was likely a predator with good eyesight, the team concludes. It had tail flukes and unique finlike pectoral structures that probably made it a fast, agile swimmer.

Unfortunately, the quarry that over several decades yielded S. bartelsi and many other Devonian fossils has been closed for economic reasons. Paleontologists must wait for new fossils to turn up elsewhere—or hope that slabs already excavated may fill some of the remaining gaps in arthropod evolution. (Science)