• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

490-Million-Year-Old Trilobites Encased In Volcanic Rock Could Solve Ancient Geography Puzzle

November 23, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

The humble trilobite may be long-extinct, but even as fossils, there’s much they can teach us about the history of our planet. In fact, ancient arthropods – including 10 newly discovered species – that lived nearly half a billion years ago could provide the missing pieces to the puzzle of where Thailand fitted in the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana.

The fossils were discovered in a little-studied region of Thailand, Ko Tarutao, in a green layer of rock called a tuff – coincidentally, this type of rock is, in fact, tough. It’s formed when ash from volcanic eruptions settles on the seafloor and is gradually compressed into solid rock.

Advertisement

Within the fossil-containing tuff were crystals of zircon, a chemically stable, resilient mineral containing atoms of uranium, which gradually decay and transform into lead atoms. As a result, researchers could use radio isotope techniques to date the zircon, and thus the age of the eruption that led to the tuff and the trilobites within it.

They discovered that the trilobites dated back to around 490 million years ago, during the late Cambrian period, making the tuff a rare find. “Not many places around the world have this. It is one of the worst dated intervals of time in Earth’s history,” said co-author Nigel Hughes in a statement.

As well as discovering 10 new trilobite species within the tuff, the researchers found 12 types of trilobite that had never been discovered in Thailand, but had been found in other places. Together with the dating of the tuff, this could provide clues as to where the region would have been in relation to other countries when they were all part of Gondwana, the ancient supercontinent. 

black and white image of trilobite fossil

One of the newly discovered species, Tsinania sirindhornae, was named after Thailand’s Royal Princess.

Image credit: Shelly Wernette/UCR

“We can now connect Thailand to parts of Australia, a really exciting discovery,” explained first author Shelly Wernette. This suggests that the region that went on to become modern-day Thailand was on the outer margins of Gondwana.

Advertisement

It’s hoped this discovery could help provide further insight into the geographical history of the other areas where the trilobites have been found, but where rock has been difficult to date. “The tuffs will allow us to not only determine the age of the fossils we found in Thailand, but to better understand parts of the world like China, Australia, and even North America where similar fossils have been found in rocks that cannot be dated,” said Wernette.

The researchers also believe that the study is of use to the present, too. “What we have here is a chronicle of evolutionary change accompanied by extinctions. The Earth has written this record for us, and we’re fortunate to have it,” said Hughes. “The more we learn from it the better prepared we are for the challenges we’re engineering on the planet for ourselves today.”

The study is published in Papers in Palaeontology.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Motor racing-Love it or hate it, Formula One returns to Dutch shores
  2. Commerzbank to appoint new board members from Erste and Roland Berger – Handelsblatt
  3. New Bionic Patch Can Reverse Traumatic Erectile Dysfunction In Pigs
  4. To Colonize Squid, Bioluminescent Bacteria Need To Know When To Count

Source Link: 490-Million-Year-Old Trilobites Encased In Volcanic Rock Could Solve Ancient Geography Puzzle

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version