Sunday, October 2, 2011


Deiphon is a Silurian trilobite which had long, conical spines on its body. It had a very large, round glabella, or middle cheek. Some scientists believe the glabella was filled with fat or oil, to keep the trilobite buoyant. But others think Deiphon was predatory and that it stored prey inside the glabella. 

My interpretation of Deiphon on the Silurian sea floor. 

Deiphon's spines may have made it hard for larger predators to swallow it. Deiphon was either planktonic and ate phytoplankton, or was benthic and predatory.

Deiphon had long, curved spines along its thorax, and two spines that formed a v-shape on its pygidium, or tail. It also had two spines on its cephalon, one on each side. Deiphon's thorax was much skinnier than that of most other trilobites. All these odd features would have made Deiphon a very strange trilobite.

Click image to see more of Christian Richet's illustrations.



  1. Arthropods are so cool.
    You should study them for a living.

  2. Yah, I think that would be cool to study arthropods for a living. I also like many other types of prehistoric animals, like echinoderms and Vetulicolians and other creatures. But I would like to study prehistoric life for a living, and definitely arthropods!

  3. I don't think I'd ever appreciated the incredible variety of trilobites before reading this blog. It's like they were the beetles of, well, the incredibly long period of time during which they existed. It's hard to believe they went extinct. (Wikipedia tells me it was the Permian extinction, which it would be, but that they pretty much died out during the Devonian, so... should I blame our fish ancestors ? Stupid fish ancestors)

    Also, I think your interpretations are utterly adorable and you should keep that up.

  4. The Permian mass extinction is what got rid of the last existing trilobites, but what got rid of most of the trilobites was the Devonian mass extinction.

    The trilobites are very interesting and it's amazing how many varieties there were.

    Thank you for reading my blog!