A team of Oxford researchers led by Associate Professor Dr. Luke Parry uncovered a 450-million-year-old arthropod from a fossil preserved in fool’s gold. This discovery is significant as it helps settle an ongoing debate among palaeontologists about the development of appendages at the front of arthropods’ heads.
An arthropod is an animal with no internal skeleton and the fossil is a distant relative of spiders and scorpions. The fossil, named Lomankus edgecombei and originally discovered in New York, provides strong support for the hypothesis that the appendages found on the heads of ancient megacheirans did evolve into appendages found on modern arthropods. It also reveals that megacheirans, a group of arthropods, lived much longer than previously thought.
Dr. Parry told Cherwell he initially chose to do a three-dimensional CT scan of the fossil, housed in Yale’s Peabody Museum, because he believed the iron pyrite – also known as fool’s gold – preservation would yield exceptional scan results. Only after analysing the data did he realise the fossil was a new species: “It’s very similar in form to a Cambrian animal called Leanchoilia, but it’s rather fearsome-looking three claws weren’t present in earlier fossils, suggesting the appendage likely served a different function.”
Emphasising the rarity of a 3D fossil, Parry told Cherwell that the majority of fossils from the Cambrian and Ordovician periods (around 540-440 million years ago) are flattened during fossilisation. The soft, shrimp-like Lomankus would normally decay within days, but it survived thanks to a unique combination of conditions where “everything was just right”.
Parry notes that further research could involve making 3D models to study how the appendages would have functioned and is “sure there are lots of new discoveries to come” from this discovery.
