Paleontologists from the Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague, and their colleagues describes a 465-million-year-old trilobite with preserved gut contents in a new study. The research was published in Nature.
“The digestive tract of the trilobite Bohemolichas incola was tightly packed with calcareous shells and their fragments that belonged to marine invertebrates such as ostracods, bivalves and echinoderms, some of them identifiable to the species level. The authors propose that the trilobite was an opportunistic scavenger, a light crusher and a chance feeder that ate dead or living animals, which either disintegrated easily or were small enough to be swallowed whole, without any attempt to reject the hard shells.”
“The digestive tract of the trilobite Bohemolichas incola was tightly packed with calcareous shells and their fragments that belonged to marine invertebrates such as ostracods, bivalves and echinoderms, some of them identifiable to the species level. The authors propose that the trilobite was an opportunistic scavenger, a light crusher and a chance feeder that ate dead or living animals, which either disintegrated easily or were small enough to be swallowed whole, without any attempt to reject the hard shells.”