Trilobites killed by volcanic ash | Hacker News Reader

Trilobites killed by volcanic ash

bristol.ac.uk

135 pointsgeox23 comments

> Palaeontologists have described more than 20,000 species of trilobites, ranging in body length from less than two millimetres to more than 90 centimetres.

The trilobite.info site has lots of drawings of all the different trilobites that have been described: https://www.trilobites.info/

I love the design of that website.

I didn’t design it but my HTML 3.0 skills from the 90s could have. That being said, it’s not laden with ads and is fairly easy to navigate which is pretty nice. The mobile view looks like a desktop version scrunched into my phone but is still alright, I guess.

What do you like about the design?

I like how it feels unique and themes itself around the content it contains. Instead of just being yet another website with a flat simple design. We need more websites like this.

I like that it's unassuming and content-driven. It doesn't communicate an aspiration to be a design object or project focus group assumptions about user experience.

It just presents a lot of information and makes that information appropriately navigable. The lack of trendy design language makes me believe that the operator knows and cares about the subject matter itself, which I find reassuring and refreshing in a world that's become saturated in blogspam, SEO, subscription sales, and ad engagement.

Authenticity.

Gives me nostalgia for learning about random subjects on the early web, pre-Wikipedia. Stumbling upon a site like this would be a treasure trove if you were interested in these back in the day.

The website itself is like a fossil.

Straight out of 1990s!

Many of the pages have:

  <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.7 [en]C-CCK-MCD NSCPCD47 (Win95; I) [Netscape]">

which would place them around 1999.

> trilobites.info

Damn this website is amazing!

I love finding old internet style websites like this. Simple, fast, packed full of information.

This website perfectly illustrates how website design has gone horribly wrong in the last 24 years.

This comes from the same researcher that was featured in the Nature cover in 2010 for showing that multicellular organisms were way older than originally thought (at least 2.1b years ago):

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09166

(remember reading that one back then...)

It’s just amazing that fossils even exist. Thanks, random natural events and processes for showing us what the freakin’ distant past looked like!

We even have a record of ancient Earth’s magnetic fields :) The geological record is pretty amazing indeed!

How is magnetic field history figured out?

Basalt on the ocean floor records the magnetic field of the earth from when it cooled. Since it radiates out from midoceanic rifts and the rate of its creation is known, we can use it as a diary of the magnetic field. Iirc we first figured it out during WW2 doing magnetic bathyometry to help ships navigate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remanence can get you started!

I did horribly in this lab session in college but it was still fun.

There must have been a whole shitload of the little bugs. We've found so many of their fossils, that they are a commodity.

For each fossil, there's probably a thousand individuals that never got rocked.

> The ‘Pompei’ trilobites are so remarkable because they are not flattened or deformed like many fossils and every leg is arranged as it was in life

Going from a 2D image to 3D must be really quite something!

Curious. I believed trilobites have just evolved into "horseshoe crabs".

Is easy to identify them as that, but Arachnids and antennas are incompatible and Chelicerata (like horseshoe crabs) is the only group bearing chelicera. Crustaceans have two pairs of antennas and different shaped legs. Insects are (almost) non marine (a few notorious exceptions). Millipedes were never found on the sea and the head appendix were placed in different segments.

But the new info about the mouth parts is extraordinary and could still lead to big discoveries and earthquakes in taxonomy. The problem with this animals is that all the mouth pieces that fossilized were from different types or in different positions compared with all arthropods alive or extinct that were not trilobites.

The new specimens, which were killed and fossilised quickly when volcanic ash smothered them underwater more than 500 million years ago, show details never before seen in any trilobite...

First sentence of TFA.

This is not a claim that all trilobites were made extinct by volcanic ash, but that these fossils were the result of an ashfall, by which previously unavailable anatomical detail was preserved. The headline is misleading, but even the shallowest read of the article would have mooted your speculation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com