3.1" Crotalocephalina Trilobite - Rock Underneath Shell Removed

Crotalocephalina Trilobite - Rock Underneath Shell Removed #189993

This is a stunningly prepared, 3.1" long, trilobite (Crotalocephalina gibbus) quarried from the Lhandar Formation near Atchana, Morocco. It is a beautiful specimen on it's own but the preparation is unique in that nearly all of the limestone has been removed from underneath the shell. If backlight is the calcite shell will be translucent. Preparing a specimen like this adds many, many hours to the preparation time, hence the higher price.

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: over 25,000 species have been described, filling nearly every evolutionary niche. Due in large part to their hard exoskeletons (shells), they left an excellent fossil record.

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