He said at one time, they were covered with spiny urchins, but now they are covered in algae, sick from disease and stressed by rising water temperatures.
It was basically a big, tank-like roomba, slowly combing the sediment at the bottoms and banks of swamps and rivers with spiny sweep-feeding appendages.
Right. As you know, Australia has many unique species of animals due to its long geographical isolation, such as kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, wombats, dingoes, possums, platypuses, spiny anteaters and so on.
To test this hypothesis, researchers have compared carbon and nitrogen isotope levels from the bones of extinct lemurs to the levels seen in the plants of the spiny forest.
California Sheephead use pointed teeth from their oral jaws to pry urchins off rocks before crushing their spiny exteriors in strong pharyngeal jaws that have fused with the bones of their skulls.
Sure enough, about 20 million years after the first appearance of jaws, new variations of spiny, spiky trilobites started showing up in the fossil record, like Dicranurus here prickling with curved spines.