The Trilobite Mission

    
Today I did something super cool! Well, I say super cool, really most people would probably call it impressively nerdy. I bought a fossil!

Yes, I have always found fossils in museums interesting. Sure, I like dinosaurs as much as the next person. But ever since taking Dr. Platt's Evolution and Speciation class a few quarters ago I have had a new found appreciation of the fossil record and all of the fascinating information it provides to so many fields of science. I got it into my head that I would very much like to own a little piece of this most prestigious record of all of history. However, finding fossils on the internet is dodgy at best and I put it on the back burner. For the past several weeks I have been seeing billboards all over Denver advertising a gem, mineral, and fossil show. Upon spying those massive yellow beacons I realized that it was time to resume the search.



My favorite dinosaur: archaeopteryx.

I then completely forgot about the fossil show. Seriously. I had made a mental note that it was the weekend after school started and tentatively planned a little visit for Friday. Well the week got away from me. Then Saturday escaped. Luckily, the billboard struck again, and on my way to lunch with my parents today I realized I had to get to the coliseum!

Flash forward a few hours to my dad and I pulling into the parking lot after an encounter with a large puddle that left me wishing the electric windows had a faster motor (real nice, Dad). Upon leaving the car we found ourselves wandering by several large tents in the parking lot displaying everything from 8-foot-tall geodes filled with purple crystals to box upon box of rocks that looked like they could have come from my yard. Inside, the entire upper floor was devoted to beads, gems, gold, and silver. This is where all of the cool, artsy women milled around scouting out one of a kind components that they will undoubtedly make into designer jewelry or top dollar sculptures. I drug my dad straight past all of that only glancing at these many, many booths and tables. We were there for a different reason, fossils!

To get to our goal we had to go downstairs to a much less densely populated area. Honestly, the signs may as well have read - Get in the Basement you Dinosaur Weirdos. I have seen that very floor occupied by cheerleading competitions and rodeos but today it played host to, well, a lot more gems. And some fossils! I wandered the floor browsing some very interesting, almost artful collections of fish fossils. We saw fossilized pine cones, enormous teeth of ancient sharks, and even a few fully mounted dinosaur bones on loan from a museum. While these were all fascinating and even beautiful in their own ways I really already knew what I wanted. I was on a mission to leave that show with a trilobite.

Beautiful and exotic, right?

Now, a cool kid (are there cool kids at fossil shows?) would want a T-rex tooth or a Raptor claw but I had my heart set on, well, basically a bug. But there is a good reason for this, several in fact! For one thing, these guys are extremely old. They first showed up around 526 million years ago and they didn't go completely extinct until the mass extinction 270 million years ago. Furthermore, at one time there were about 17,000 species of these guys in Earth's oceans ("Trilobite" is an umbrella term for all of these species, meaning "three lobes"). These little creatures literally ruled our earth for those 250 million years. You've got to respect that! It is an amazing jolt of perspective to think that the outline of a body in a hunk of rock was an actual living creature walking the earth, or in the trilobite's case, shuffling around the ocean floor, something like 350 million years ago. Seriously, that is so cool.

It's not terribly hard to figure out the morphology on these.

So there I was in a convention hall full of fossils, searching for my perfect arthropod. I first spotted a few teeny little trilobites in a case at one of the larger booths. These turned out to be a bit too expensive for me to justify. I next came across a fairly large specimen at another table. It was already cheaper and the owner would almost certainly have haggled it down a bit as he was clearly looking to get rid of as much stuff as he could on the last day of the show. I just couldn't quite commit to such a big fossil. Plus, the moment I showed even the slightest interest in it another man looked ready to pounce. Not having seen the perfect trilobite I toyed with the idea of fossil fish instead. After browsing a booth with a ton of cool fish specimens I just couldn't quite do it. I really wanted a trilobite! Also, I thought it might be a bit cruel to keep a fossil fish on my desk in view of my living fish and constantly remind poor Archibald of his own mortality. (Seriously, this was a concern, what is wrong with me?)

Not having come to the fossil show in the right frame of mind to face a moral dilemma over prehistoric sea bugs, I had very nearly resigned myself to the idea of just giving in to the expensive, little trilobites. But, as luck would have it, on my way back across the floor to the first booth, I noticed a table I had missed before. Lo and behold, trilobites! This particular specimen was almost as much as the first ones but it was bigger and it came as a pair! My dad, having been sucked into the exciting world of fossils himself, offered to split the price and keep half of the pair. Deal!

The pair!

We are now the proud owners of two (and a half) trilobites! The super cool thing about it is that the reason they were a pair is because they are actually the positive and negative side of one individual fossil plus half of another! This means that when the fossil was found and the rock was split open, both the three dimensional, raised fossilized body parts and the impression these left on the other half of the rock remained intact. We have both halves and I am beyond pleased with my purchase! Here's to my own little piece of deep history!

The positive side inverted on the negative side.

 

Thinking of going to a fossil show?

Pro Tip: If you are a young woman falling in the gap between the usual female fossil show demographic, younger than 10 or older than 50, be prepared to be chatted up. The guys may be cute, geeky sorts but they will be very bad flirts. And given that you are at a fossil show you're probably pretty terrible at it yourself. It will be awkward. Your dad will see.