LabKitty Recommends: The Trilobite Book

Riccardo Levi-Setti has been writing books on trilobites for decades, but none more sumptuous than his latest. If your idea of these extinct arthropods is grey lumpen shapes dotting some nondescript rock outcropping at the local museum, then let The Trilobite Book absolve you of that notion. Levi-Setti gives us a coffee table collection of exemplary finds from around the world -- North America to Russia, Newfoundland to Morocco

There are no nondescript lumpen shapes here. We see trilobites preserved forever in defensive posture (all for naught, obvs), in mid-molt, or assembled in a mass gathering (probably in preparation for egg fertilization). Digital colorization of the images brings out important trilo-details, although many specimens exhibit brilliant colors in situ (yellow or red ochre if FeO2 or FeO3 was deposited during fossilization. Or, on rarer occasions, calcium carbonate, which renders the fossil chalk white. Ghost trilobite!). And those details are astonishing. Ogle cranidial furrows and librigena, tuberculated carapaces and pygidial spines, flowing cephalic processes and waving eye stalks. Indeed, an entire chapter is devoted to the trilobite's famous schizochoral eye -- individual ommatida organized into a logarithmic spiral, separated by a sclera and protected by an overhanging eyeshade that functioned as a primitive pupil -- the superb preparations producing anatomy that is eerily lifelike.

Large-eyed mummy of ancient rocks, Timothy Conrad penned in his Ode to the Trilobite in 1840. Levi-Setti gives us a visual experience of these mummies returned to life, a glimpse of Ordovician seas hundreds of millions of years before the first human arrived on the scene.

See Trilobites on Amazon