History of invertebrate paleozoology and simpler sea-dwelling organisms. By far, invertebrate paleozoology is the easiest type of fossil collecting. "Unlike" the difficult-to-analyze and hard-to-interpret fossils of paleobotany (plants) and micropaleontology (microbes), and "unlike" the rarely found and poorly preserved skeletons of vertebrate paleontology, invertebrate fossils are usually both common and simple to identify. This is because many prehistoric invertebrates were hard-shelled mollusks, brachiopods, trilobites, bryozoans, crinoids or corals who were buried amid marine, sediment-preserving conditions; and therefore frequently fossilized. Stone-age people were without doubt the very first fossil collectors. Fossilized echinoderms have been found in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, central England, decorating a long-buried human skeleton;
Portuguese man o' war Portuguese man o' war The Atlantic Portuguese man o' war ("Physalia physalis"), also known as the man-of-war, is a marine hydrozoan of the family Physaliidae found in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. Its long tentacles deliver a painful sting, which is venomous and powerful enough to kill fish or, rarely, humans. Despite its appearance, the Portuguese man o' war is not a true jellyfish but a siphonophore, which is not actually a single multicellular organism (true jellyfish are single organisms), but a colonial organism made up of specialized individual animals (of the same species) called zooids or polyps. These