What are Some Extinct Arthropods?
Arthropods are a huge animal phylum which includes crustaceans, arachnids, myriapods (millipedes and centipedes), insects, and their close relatives. With over a million described species, arthropods make up 80% of all living species. If aliens visited Earth and were required to take a sample of a “typical Earth animal,” they’d take an arthropod. Though there are millions of arthropod species alive today, there are many additional millions of extinct arthropods which died out throughout the 600 million year history of multicellular life. Paleontologists have dug up a few tens of thousands of these extinct arthropods as fossils, and done their best to analyze what exactly they looked like and how they lived. A tremendous amount of knowledge has been uncovered, and now we know about many species of extinct arthropods which haven’t been alive for hundreds of millions of years. Arthropods are one of the many phyla that emerged around the Cambrian-Precambrian boundary, 542 million years ago
