The Appendages, Anatomy, and Relationships of TrilobitesRaymond, Percy E. (Percy Edward)
Science
The Appendages, Anatomy, and Relationships of Trilobites
Raymond, Percy E. (Percy Edward)
Trilobites
The discussion in a former section of this essay on the
relationship between the various orders of Arachnida led to the
conclusion that the primitive arachnids were aquatic animals,
breathing by means of appendicular gills. Naturally, therefore, we
compare the arachnids with the Crustacea rather than with the
Insecta. The immediate progenitors of the Arachnida appear to have
possessed a head with four pairs of limbs, a thorax with three
segments, and an abdomen with thirteen segments and' a telson, only
six of which can be clearly shown by comparative morphology to have
carried appendicular gills. But embryological evidence enables us
to postulate with confidence still more remote ancestors in which
the head carried well developed compound eyes and five pairs of
appendages, while it may be supposed that all the abdominal
segments, except the anal, bore limbs. In these very ancient
arthropods, all the limbs, except the feelers, had ambulatory and
branchial branches; and one important feature in the evolution of
the Arachnida must have been the division of labour between the
anterior and posterior limbs, the former becoming specialized for
locomotion, the latter for breathing. Another was the loss of
feelers and the degeneration of the compound eyes. Thus we are led
to trace the Arachnida (including the Merostomata and Xiphosura)
back to ancestors which can not be regarded as arachnids, but which
were identical with the primitive trilobites, and near the
ancestral stock of the whole crustacean class.
TRILOBITES NOT ARACHNIDA.
While no one having any real knowledge of the Trilobita has adopted
Lankester's scheme of the inclusion of the group as the primitive
grade in the Arachnida, reference to it may not be amiss. This theory
is best set forth in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition,
under the article on Arachnida. It is there pointed out that the
primitive arachnid, like the primitive crustacean, should be an animal
without a fixed number of somites, and without definitely grouped
tagmata. As Lankester words it, they should be anomomeristic and
anomotagmatic. The trilobites are such animals, and he considers them
Arachnida and not Crustacea for the following reasons:
Firstly and chiefly, because they have only one pair (apart from the
eyes) of pre-oral appendages. "This fact renders their association
with the Crustacea impossible, if classification is to be the
expression of genetic affinity inferred from structural coincidence."
Secondly, the lateral eyes resemble no known eyes so closely as the
lateral eyes of _Limulus_.
Thirdly, the trilobation of the head and body, due to the expansion
and flattening of the sides or pleura, is like that of _Limulus_, but
"no crustacean exhibits this trilobite form."
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