Marine Pompeii: A Stunning Paleontological Discovery

2024-07-05 22:10:00

It is a real marine Pompeii discovered by Professor Abderrazak El Albani, from the University of Poitiers, in Morocco. 515 million years ago, a volcanic eruption froze forever, in ash, an entire population of trilobites – the ancestors of insects and crustaceans. A stunning paleontological discovery makes the front page of a prestigious magazine Science.

It is a whole living ecosystem, 515 million years old, that was immediately caught, petrified in ashes, by a volcanic eruption – as explosive as that of Vesuvius 2,000 years ago, which was frozen forever the city and the inhabitants of Pompeii.

Otherwise 500 million years ago, they were trilobites, arthropods living in water, covered with solid exoskeletons, the ancestors of insects, crustaceans, spiders and other centipedes, which populate the shallow waters of the Moroccan High Atlas. These trilobites must have been hunting other small invertebrates on the surface of the water when a fiery cloud of volcanic lava buried them almost immediately and reduced them to ashes, for exactly 515 million years to eternity.

And here to the Franco-Moroccan geographer, Abderrazak El Albani, professor at the University of Poitiers, already recognized for revolutionizing the history of life by revealing in Gabon the multicellular life forms much older than expected, that they are completely fossilized in the Tatlet geological formation in Ait Youb, at Morocco.

An important discovery for the knowledge of trilobites

This is an extraordinary discovery for paleontologists who until now only knew about trilobites from their calcite skeletons, the only part of their bodies to be fossilized. However, this volcanic eruption froze them alive in their entirety with their internal organs and muscles, the biological tissues were immediately consumed by the intense heat, leaving cavities that are in the way of the molds of all their internal organs.

Thanks to an imaging technique, X-ray micro-tomography, Professor El Albani, with an international team of researchers, was able to study them in 3D without removing them from their stone matrix. By digitally filling in the “models”, they managed to recreate the bodies of these extinct arthropods with an unprecedented level of detail, completely striking, down to the hairs of the trilobites, their spines, their trachea digestion, and even ‘to the. microorganisms that fed in their mouths! Professor El Albani’s team even discovered two new species of unknown trilobites, which identified their labrum, a type of upper lip present in certain living arthropods.

Marine trilobites, like no one has ever seen them, make the color cover of an international magazine Science thanks to the intelligence, perseverance and all-terrain commitment of the brilliant bi-national researcher who continues to open new windows for us on the past life on earth.