Trilobites, they're extinct, right?   What's so interesting about something dead and gone?  Sure, 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' and all that, but stay a spell; consider what these ancient arthropods have to show and tell.   These primitive invertebrates came on the world scene along with the earliest fossil remains of life on earth.  The end of their more than three hundred million years existence was swamped during the enormous cataclysm that zapped so many life forms at the end of the Paleozoic Era.   During that long life-span trilobites populated the world's oceans from the deepest seas to the shallowest coast lines.  As a consequence their captivating imprints are to be found on all the continents wherever rocks from that time have come to the surface.

    The general outline made up of three lobes with a head or cephalon, a body or thorax, and a tail or pygidium is characteristic of all trilobites.  On this basic model the critter developed a staggering variety or permutations and combinations.   Some were blind, some had outlandish dragonfly-like eyes, some were floaters, others were designed for a half-buried lifestyle.  Some tails were bitsy, others sizable shields; the largest were a yard long, the smallest barely showed up a flea.  You can speculate on the variety of their diets.  That they were also a feast for lurking predators is a sure thing.  I have one that looks like something took a bite out of its pygidium.

Collecting on a Tremadocian outcropping.