1.9" Multi-Toned, Coltraneia Trilobite - Unusual Location

Multi-Toned, Coltraneia Trilobite - Unusual Location #125132

This is a 1.9" long, bug-eyed, Coltraneia trilobite with amazing "tower eyes" full of hundreds of eye facets. Nearly all of the Coltraneia come from Ofaten, Morocco but this one comes from Issoumour and has different preservation. It has a naturally multi-toned shell coloration due to one side of the trilobite being closer to a seem in the rock that allowed for minerals to be leached from the shell.

Trilobites were a very diverse group of extinct marine arthropods. They first appeared in the fossil record in the Early Cambrian (521 million years ago) and went extinct during the Permian mass extinction (250 million years ago). They were one of the most successful of the early animals on our planet with over 25k currently described species, filling nearly every evolutionary niche. Due in large part to a hard exoskeleton (shell), they left an excellent fossil record.

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