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Enrollment in arthropods

Unveiling ancient secrets: 3D preservation of trilobite soft tissues sheds light on convergent evolution of defensive enrollment

December 20, 2023

They’d been in the collections of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) since the 1870s when they were first discovered. Nestled in among the largest collection of trilobites, the unique fossils rested in drawers until 145 years later when  Sarah Losso, PhD candidate in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB) at Harvard, began combing through the collection of trilobites as part of her dissertation.

“I started my PhD going through all of these thin sections of...

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A fossil from the Fezouata Shale of Morocco shows a straight-shelled nautiloid that died, fell to the seafloor, and was colonized by dozens of tiny pterobranchs_by Javier Ortega-Hernández

480-Million-year-old fossil reveals ancient seafloor communities

October 11, 2023

In a study published in Nature, researchers, led by postdoctoral researcher Karma Nanglu, describe a 480-million-year-old cephalod from Morocco that shows the earliest example of ocean bottom dwellers making their home in dead bodies.

Dead bodies in the ocean drift to the bottom where they become home to bottom dwellers, the practice dates back to 530 million years ago. During the Paleozoic era, however, it became much harder to track the interspecies interactions. Nanglu and co-authors,...

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