Invertebrate Paleontology

For more than 270 million years, trilobites were among the most successful and diverse creatures on Earth, with over 22,000 known species spanning the Paleozoic Era. Yet, despite their abundance in the fossil record and their presence on every continent...

It had been a long day of teaching for Rudy Lerosey-Aubril . As a reward, he returned to cleaning an intriguing Cambrian arthropod fossil he had recently received for review. At first, the specimen showed all the expected characteristics of its time – yet...

Those tiny “question marks” etched into ancient shells? They’re not random scratches—they’re the calling cards of a 480-million-year-old parasite! A new study Published in iScience has revealed that a parasite still plaguing modern oysters today has been...

A set of spiny fossil limbs pulled from ancient rock in Morocco has pushed the origin story of “sea scorpions” back in time, revealing that these fearsome predators were already highly specialized hunters nearly half a billion years ago. A new study...

Javier Ortega-Hernández, MCZ Faculty-Curator in Invertebrate Paleontology, is featured in Harvard Magazine's Five Questions. Five Questions with Javier Ortega-Hernández: A professor of evolutionary biology on what shaped life more than 500 million years...

The Burgess Shale in British Columbia is renowned for its exceptional preservation of soft tissues in fossils, including limbs and guts. While trilobites are abundant in the fossil record thanks to their hard exoskeleton, their soft limbs are rarely...

In a twist worthy of a detective novel, a long-misidentified fossil at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) has emerged as a key discovery in early animal evolution. Originally described in 1865 as a caterpillar, Palaeocampa anthraxshuffled...

From the Harvard Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology: For over a century, the Cambrian arthropod Helmetia expansa remained a mystery. Discovered by paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott in 1918, it was initially classified as a crustacean...

From the Harvard Gazette, Big discovery about microscopic ‘water bears’: Bit of happenstance, second look at ancient fossils leads to new insights into evolution of tardigrade, one of most indestructible life forms on planet They may be microscopic, but...

From the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology: In a new study published in Royal Society Open Science, research scientist Rudy Lerosey-Aubril and Professor and Curator in Invertebrate Paleontology Javier Ortega-Hernández present their finding...