Cambrian Explosion #51: Artiopoda – Surprising Lookalikes

The aglaspidid artiopodans were a major lineage of early Paleozoic euarthropods – one of the most diverse after their cousins the trilobites, although far far behind them in terms of actual species numbers.

But despite their diversity and worldwide range actual fossils of them are incredibly rare, and for a long time they were considered to be a “problematic” wastebasket group of uncertain affinities, mainly interpreted as being related to the chelicerates. More recently evidence from preserved limb anatomy has instead placed them within the artiopodans in a grouping known as vicissicaudatans, closely related to forms like Sidneyia and the later cheloniellids.

Unusually for euarthropods they had a phosphatic exoskeleton, and they experienced their main burst of diversification in the late parts of the Cambrian period, after most of the actual evolutionary explosion had already settled.

They mainly inhabited shallow near-shore environments, and may actually have been some of the very first animals to venture onto land. Some examples of the trace fossil Protichnites might represent aglaspidids scuttling over the Cambrian shorelines to mate and lay their eggs in a similar manner to horseshoe crabs.

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Cambrian Explosion #50: Artiopoda – More Than Just Trilobites

The dominant group of Cambrian euarthropods were the artiopodans, a hugely diverse and long-lasting lineage that included the familiar trilobites along with all their close relatives.

They were some of the first euarthropods to appear in the fossil record, with fully formed trilobites seeming to “suddenly” appear about 521 million years ago and quickly spread worldwide. With the ancestral euarthropods estimated to have arisen between 550 and 540 million years ago, and the ancestral artiopodans not long after that, this means there must have been a lot of very rapid evolution and diversification in the space of just 20-30 million years.

Artiopodans were generally seafloor-crawling animals with flattened bodies and wide flaring segments in a trilobite-like shape. Different species could range from about 1mm (0.04″) to around 70cm long (2’4″) – with the largest Cambrian forms reaching as much as 55cm (1’10”), rivalling some of the bigger radiodonts in size.

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