Consider this Lobster

I just had to write that title!

I'm going to be post an exciting new blog each night this week, and for tonight, for the first time, I'm combining my love of fossils with food.

If you haven't read the book, David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster" is a fun collection of essays. One of the essays, like this post, involves paleontology (about the search for the largest known shark, the aptly named 'megalodon' ["big tooth"], scientific name Carcharadon megalodon).

I'm not a big fan of lobster (nor am I willing to pay that price for a bottom-feeding, scavenging invertebrate!), but I love eating other crustaceans of the Order Decapoda. The decapods, which means "ten feet," include most crustaceans that you know and love (to eat): crabs, crayfish, shrimp, and lobsters.

I spent a summer studying the putative first-ever decapod, Palaeopalaemon newberryi. This creature lived ~375 million years ago - 375 million years of our favorite crustaceans crawling around the ocean depths! And if you saw the specimen (low resolution drawing below), you'd say it looks like a crayfish - except with some big differences. Unlike crayfish, it lived in the ocean, back during the Devonian Period (the Age of Fishes - when great armored fish and a wide diversity of sharks filled the seas). Also unlike crayfish, it had not yet evolved the large claws that we are forced to shackle with rubber bands in the grocer's aquarium. Palaeopalaemon only had tiny pincers, no claws to speak of.

As a kid catching crayfish I would let the small ones pinch me, curious to see how strong they were. For the small ones, not very strong at all. I wouldn't do that with a lobster. As for our friends on the scale, I cannot believe those poor suckers didn't take off the moment they were left unattended! They were there for many minutes. Unfortunately, despite their long evolutionary history, decapods are not known for brains.


Palaeopalaemon newberryi Whitfield - possibly the oldest known decapod - the next oldest fossil doesn't come until 100 million years later!