How Would Scientists Recreate The Trilobites?

[Darth_Panda]

@Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor

Did anybody besides mean read the Thread Title as: “How Would Scientists Recreate The Tribbles?”

Yes.

[AtomicDog]

@Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor

Did anybody besides mean read the Thread Title as: “How Would Scientists Recreate The Tribbles?”

Yep.

[lazybratsche]

@CalMeacham

As I said, there was an exhibit at Harvard comparing trilobites with horseshoe crabs. You might be using a more technical definition of “superficially”, but the resmblances are pretty deep, and go far beyond “they kinda look the same”.

I was being pedantic and thinking like a molecular biologist: “superficial” is anything that you can see without high-power microscopes, molecular staining techniques, or a DNA sequencer.

Still, even if the horseshoe crab is the closest living relative of the trilobites, their most recent common ancestor is somewhere prior to 540 million years ago. If we could somehow obtain a trilobite genome, I’d bet that it wouldn’t share many more genes with the horseshoe crab than with other chelicarates.