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A trilobite is an arthropod, so there are arthropods today
like lobsters, the horseshoe crab.
Trilobites are marine arthropods, so that means they only lived in the seas.
They appeared in the Cambrian Period and they went extinct at the end of the Permian Period,
so they survived for several hundred million years.
What interests me about trilobites is they're the first dominant form of life on Earth.
Well before dinosaurs were here, long before man was even a dream on the planet,
trilobites were here dominating the oceans of the world.
They were very successful animals.
You know we've been on the Earth for just a couple million years so
by comparison the trilobites had been here a long time.
What we study is the morphology- that's all we have, there's no DNA available.
So what we examine is the structures
like these stalked eyes over here. Those eyes probably protruded from the sediment
so the animals themselves
burrowed in the sediment looking for something good to eat.
But at the same time their eyes protruded above,
checking out predators or something like that.
There are many of these that have spines on them.
and the spines were undoubtedly for protection, because it was just at that time that you
begin to find animals hovering in the water like cephalopods, that are predators
vicious predators and these predators would attack the trilobites
so the trilobites developed spines to protect themselves.
There are new specimens coming out all the time. There are diggers in Libya, in Morocco,
in Russia, in California, Nevada- and they can find new stuff every day.
Most trilobites when you split the rock
and you see the bug, half will be in one side, in the positive, half will be in the negative
and then it involves literally picking pieces off of
one side and meticulously placing it in the other side.
The work can be several hours or it can be literally hundreds of hours.
In this one case is a variety, all through the
Paleozoic from the Cambrian into the Permian.
They're also some of the best preserved specimens in the world,
so that makes them unusual,
and was trying to convey the variety of shapes and sizes.
So all of that, we hope will leave the visitor with an appreciation
diversity and antiquity of life.