Bumpy Enrolled Morocops (Phacops) Trilobite

This is a very bumpy example of a Morocops (Barrandeops) trilobite from Morocco. It has been cleaned with air abrasives and is completely free of the surrounding matrix. There is some weathering to the shell, but it still shows a lot of surface detail including many of the eye facets.

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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