Researchers from North Carolina State University working in New York City found that hungry urban arthropods play a significant role in the disposal of trash.
Walcott became a leading authority on trilobites and was the first person to establish that trilobites were arthropods, the group that includes modern insects and crustaceans.
Other than living on Earth, we don't have a lot in common with these arthropods, the group of animals that includes everything from spiders to insects to crustaceans like these guys.
With more oxygen in the air, arthropods’ bodies could grow way bigger, leading to mega-bugs like a dragonfly the size of an eagle and a millepede the size of a two-person kayak.
Most of the main groups of the animal kingdom—arthropods, brachiopods, coelenterates, echinoderms, molluscs and even chordates, the branch from which vertebrates went on to develop—are found in the fossil beds of the Cambrian.
In 1822, a French naturalist by the name of Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire cut open a lobster and noticed that its arthropod anatomy was essentially a mirror image of our own, along what is called the dorsoventral axis.