Trilobite Beetle of Borneo ~ Just LOOK at it! :)

From QuaoArlo on MySpace:
Description: Neotonous female trilobite beetle Duliticola (Lycidae) in Gunung Mulu National Park/ Sarawak/ Malaysia/ Borneo
lucky760says...

No fucking way! You guys are not nearly impressed enough.

Dunno how familiar everyone is with trilobites, but they "were" one of the earliest species of life on earth first showed up over 500 million years ago and lived for nearly 300 million years before going extinct. Or did they?

In my geography class we spent a weekend in Death Valley in piles of shale searching for trilobite fossils (if you got a whole body you get extra credit) and we spent much of the semester discussing them. During that whole time I continually imagined what they might have "really" looked like, then I come onto this "video shift" site where, lo and behold, there's a fricken video of one just strutting around town like it's shit doesn't stink!!! It's not just a funny looking bug, but a living fossil, and it blows my mind! Not once did my professor ever mention they have living relatives. And are they direct descendants meaning they didn't really go extinct??? WTF!

(Disclaimer: For any biblical creationists, replace each "million" above with "hundred." Kthx.)

BicycleRepairMansays...

I dont know the specifics, but the name alone, or likeness, doesnt mean its descended from trilobites, I'm pretty sure trilobites ARE extinct, and this one is named as such because it looks trilobite'ish , and lets be honest, many insects do look similar in shape to trilobites (ie: segmented body etc)

spoco2says...

Indeed, don't get too darn excited, you obviously didn't pay that much attention in your classes. For starters, Trilobites, the uber cool real ones were sea dwellers. And secondly, this is just a name someone has applied to the thing, it is not a trilobite at all.

So don't get too excited, it is just one seriously funky looking animal that looks like it's come straight out of the dinosaur age.

This is a larval stage of a beetle of this sort, and trilobites did not fly.

Doesn't detract from the coolness of this thing, but it's not a living prehistoric bug.

grintersays...

The "neotenous" tag implies that this is not a larval stage, but rather a sexually mature adult that retains larval characteristics. So,to second spoco2's comment, it's either a beetle larva, or an adult that looks like one. "Trilobite" is just it's common name.. kinda like how a "tiger beetle" isn't actually a tiger.

Now, what weirds me out is that I found something that looks very similar to this a few months back, but it didn't have a head! I had an entomologist look at the pictures. Here's and excerpt from her response:
"think it is a Lycidae larvae (coleoptera), they also called them trilobite larvae (stupid name!)".

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