Question Details	Asked By	Asked On
Cambrian Explosion	nafee9	04/15/06
What is the palaeo-environmental significance of an in-situ, articulated fossil trilobite and why? How does the biology of trilobites influence their abundance as fossils ?
Answered By		Answered On
rsalier		04/16/06
The early Cambrian Seas were fairly shallow and with shorter day length did not get as hot as todays reefs do. The seas were probably some what less salty as well though this is a matter of debate amoung paleontologists. The significance of an articulated trilobite or any other creature indicates that when it died there were no scavengers which filtered the sediments for the dead animals which floated to the bottom or along the edge of the seas where they may have washed up and would have been covered by blowing sands and sediments. During the Cambrian period, there were so many ecological niches that animals evolved into an amazing array of animals which could fill these niches. Trilobites were among them. That is why there is such an abundance of them.

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