Travels with Trilobites

For some reason, all I keep thinking of is that one day, very, very long ago, there was a very last trilobite in the ocean. It didn't know anything about the history of its kind, or even of its species. It wasn't aware that it was the final one there would ever be, but once it died, no creature of its kind ever existed again.

You could say that about all extinct species, I guess; but trilobites weren't *one* species. They were over 25,000 species, according to what we know today. They started swimming in the oceans probably about 521 million years ago, and kept on swimming them for 270 million years. Which means the very last trilobite lived closer in time to us than to the very first trilobite - and they still all died out before the dinosaurs.

...I can't handle so much time. I can't compute it. I'm trying to put it in terms of distance: if every year is a millimeter, then the first trilobite is 521 kilometers away, and the very last one is 252 kilometers away. The first dinosaur is 240 kilometers away, and the last dinosaur is 66 kilometers away. None of them are within walking distance. And the first human is 300 meters away, which is a short stroll. And the Egyptian pyramids are built a room's length away.

I don't know how I feel about all this.

Anyway. Trilobites. They were arthropods, which means they're distant cousins to both scorpions and butterflies, which really brings home how different they might have been from any of the creatures we have today. They swam the seas. They had exoskeletons, and they molted. Some were very spiny, while others seem to be smooth. Some had complex and interesting eyes. They were usually small - a few centimeters long - except for some giants which could be 20-30 centimeters long. Humans have come across their fossils time and again, and considered them "locusts" or other types of petrified bugs; and turned them into jewelry and amulets as far back as 15,000 years ago.

Trilobite fossils can be found all over Earth, in certain places where there are sediments from the right age - and then, you're likely to find *a lot* of them. Some are so well preserved that legs, eyes, gills, muscles, digestive tracks and eggs can be observed.

"Travels with Trilobites" is a journey through both time and space: its chapters are chronological, but its smaller sections take us through various quarries all over Earth where trilobites of that age appeared. It reads very much like an enthusiastic trilobite collector sharing all the exciting details with a deep passion for the subject: descriptions of quarries, explanations of what trilobite life may have been like, speculation about why they disappeared (according to current scientific theories), a bit of sighing about digging for trilobites being more and more regulated these days, enthusiasm for new techniques of extracting trilobites from their stony tombs - and so many photos!

What I felt it lacks, just a bit, is a couple of diagrams to help us identify the main parts of a trilobite and the main differences between orders and species (aside from the really obvious things, like spikes). And maybe a reconstruction for people like me, who have a hard time imagining what these creatures must have looked like in life, antennae and all.

But all in all, "Travels with Trilobites" is a wonderful book even if, like me, you've never paid much attention to amazingly old fauna before. It's informative, interesting, exciting, and I breathed it in in a couple of days. I do recommend getting the physical book, though - like all books containing many photos, it's probably much nicer like that.