Science and sensibility

Excuse me for jumping in on Wolverine Tom's territory here but this week's New Scientist reports an interesting new insight to the ancient lives of trilobites. It turns out the impressive trident sprouting from the head of some trilobites such as the Walliserops trifurcates you see depicted above were probably used, rather like deer antlers, in fighting other males for the right to mate with females.

One of the most remarkable things about life on earth is the number of times the same evolutionary theme has been explored. Everyone is familiar with mammals like deer fighting it out with other males for the rights to a territory so that they might mate. Probably fewer people are aware that some beetles, separated from the mammals in evolution by half a billion years and many thousand times smaller than a deer, play almost exactly the same game with some pretty similar anatomy.

Now it seems that same game which is being played out by beetles and deer today was played in the earth's oceans 450 million years ago.