Trilobites

"Ah yes, now we’ve got to the important animals, the ones I spent many years studying. In the sea they were as important, some say dominant, although I prefer to think of the sea as a kind of collaborative eco-system. But they were indeed a very important group of organisms that lived for nearly 300 million years, though there are people in the world that haven’t heard of them. Were, sadly. They were arthropods, joint-legged animals, very remotely related to crustaceans, crabs and and lobsters. They are probably most similar superficially to enormous woodlice. At least, some of them were. They were immensely varied. They could be up to a yard long. Most of them weren’t. Most of them were really quite small and would sit comfortably in the palm of your hand. And some were tiny. Well, in so far as it’s important to know about what the seas were like in ancient times, trilobites were one of the most important animals living there. They tell us about ancient geography because different trilobites lived in different parts of the world; they tell us about climate because some trilobites liked living in warm water and some didn’t; they tell us about how deep the water was. In short they help to paint a picture of the ancient environment. There aren’t many books on trilobites. Mine is probably the most entertaining read, he says modestly. But Whittington was my old professor. He died very recently and he was, you could say, Mr Trilobite. There was nobody who knew so much or had published so much on trilobites as Harry Whittington. He supervised my PhD so naturally he should have a place in my five books. No, no, no, no. You’ve got trilobites living along with the aforementioned Burgess Shale animals; after they died out you’ve got the rise of the dinosaurs, who died out in the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago, and only then you’ve got the rise of the mammals. And we humans were among the last of them to appear. Well, they were more like they are now than you’d imagine. There was a tropical area and a cold area. There were deep waters with blind creatures in the depths of the sea and there were even coral reefs for some of the trilobites’ history. But although the seas were similar, many of the characters that lived in the seas were very different. Some of the animals from Burgess Shale included great monsters – very, very strange-looking predators with grasping claws. Later on, there would be lots of relatives of the nautilus, of which we have one living representative today, the pearly nautilus. In the past there were hundreds of different kinds. They were probably quite important predators. Trilobites were around before the first fish, but when they appeared they eventually included many strange armoured forms with great big plates over their bodies – really quite formidable – and the trilobites, as if in response, became extremely spiny about that time. Some of them are like hedgehogs, they are so spiny. They’re very popular with collectors now. They have a great monetary value. Well prepared, dug out of the rock, you can pay two or three thousand dollars for a good trilobite, but you have to go to the right place. You could go to the Houston Fair, for example, or you could go to Morocco, which is where I’ve just been with David Attenborough to look at the land of the trilobites, where these things are collected from the rocks."