Description

Beckwithia typa Resser 1931
Upper Cambrian
Weeks Shale Formation
House Range, Millard County
Utah, USA
Big 70mm arthropod on 102mm slab. Skin is completely preserved. No restoration. Extremely rare.

Arthropod. Aglaspid. Soft-bodied.

Beckwithia is one of those bizarre arthropods you tend to see only from the Cambrian Period – a time when macroscopic life bloomed with an incredible diversity of body plans. It looks vaguely like a trilobite but is an aglaspidid of the Class Artiopoda. This is a bigger and better than average specimen of a genus rarely found.

The aglaspidids survived into the Early Ordovician but died out by the end of the period. It has been proposed that they are related to the ancestors of horseshoe crabs and arachnids.