Paleontologists at the @akademievedcr.bsky.social 🦖 | Arthropod Researcher 🦂 | Nature Explorer 🪲 | Coffee Addict ☕ | Photographer 📷 | Father 👨👦| Feminist ♀️
Lukas Laibl
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So you've heard about trilobites, but do you know Naraoids? These trilobite cousins shared similar bodies but differed in details. Most importantly, they lacked hard exoskeleton and had only soft cuticle. That's why they are known only from sites with exceptional preservation, such as Burgess Shale.
Soomaspis splendida was small Late Ordovician Naraoid that was described by Fortey and Theron in 1995 from the South African Soom Shale. For a long time, it was considered a South African endemic...until now.
My friend Radek Labuťa discovered a fossil of another Soomaspis on a spoil heap from metro construction at Pankrác (Prague). This specimen differed from the South African species, so we described it as a new species - Soomaspis labutai, named in his honor.
The paper was published in a special issue of the journal Bulletin of Geosciences, and is freely available here: www.geology.cz/bulletin/ful...
This discovery has two important implications. First, the genus Soomaspis inhabited wast coastal regions along a large part of Gondwana - it was not South African endemic. Present-day South Africa and Prague were located on opposite ends of this supercontinent.
Second, Soomaspis labutai lived about 448-445 million years ago, before the Late Ordovician glaciation and mass extinction. In contrast, Soomaspis splendida lived after this event, about 443 million years ago. The genus Soomaspis thus belongs to the rare survivors of this global catastrophe.
My childhood dream comes true! I finally visited the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs 🦖 (@cpdinosaurs.bsky.social) for the first time after seeing them in my first dinosaur book I got for Christmas back in 1992. I wish they would be available as figure replicas 😅
Just doing some research on trilobites =(:[[[[} at @nhm-london.bsky.social and here are some cool fossils from NHM collections:
Trilobite Xystridura from Cambrian of 🇦🇺
Skull of Permian amphibian Diplocaulus from 🇺🇲
Stegosaurus Sophie from Jurassic of 🇺🇲
...and a cool bronze replica of Diplodocus 🦕
• Evolution is a ladder constantly leading to the higher levels of progress!
• No, evolution is a tree where all branches are equal!
• While actual evolution... 👇
🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio #Macroecology
Lukas Laibl
Lukas Laibl
Lukas Laibl
Lukas Laibl
Lukas Laibl
Lukas Laibl
Lukas Laibl
Thrilled to finally share our new paper on giant scorpions from the Early Devonian!
Behold Praearcturus gigas!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/S54Y6Y...
Lukas Laibl
Andrej Spiridonov
Dr Richie Howard
www.geology.cz
Happy to share my new article on how morphological diversification proceeds during evolutionary radiations: "The diffused evolutionary dynamics of morphological novelty" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵 1/12
ignacio quintero
www.pnas.org
Rates of evolution are fundamental to understand the processes that shaped the history
of life. The predominant view holds that high rates of pheno...
