Viewed through a hand lens, they often prove to have lovely, evocative shapes; one species suggests a feather, another a lyre, a third the frond of a fern. Graptolites were colonial animals; each individual, known as a zooid, built itself a tiny, tubular shelter, known as a theca, which was attached to its neighbor’s, like a row house. A single graptolite fossil thus represents a whole community, which drifted or more probably swam along as a single entity, feeding off even smaller plankton.
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