26 Ceraurus Trilobites + Bryozoans From New York - Epic Plate!

This is an epic, 19" wide plate containing 26 complete Ceraurus pleurexanthemus trilobites, as well as many Bryozoan fossils and crinoid stems. It was collected from the famous Walcott-Rust Quarry in New York several years ago and took many dozens of hours of work to prepare.

The Ceraurus trilobites are wonderfully preserved with great shell detail and inflation. The largest of them measures 1.5" long which is quite large for the quarry, though most are under an inch long. The Ceraurus layer at the quarry has been completely unproductive for several years now, so it's unlikely the quarry will produce anymore of these big multiple plates in the future. A real museum piece.

The
Collecting the Walcott-Rust Quarry in Summer 2013
Collecting the Walcott-Rust Quarry in Summer 2013
Walcott-Rust quarry, located near Russia, NY, is one of the most historic trilobite collecting localities in the world. It was first worked by famed paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott along with William Rust in 1870. It was where Walcott was first introduced to trilobites; he later went on to make many amazing discoveries with the arthropods across North America, including the famed Burgess Shale. This quarry was lost for over a century, but later rediscovered in the 1990s by Thomas Whitely, who dug and researched the site heavily. It's now leased by Trilobites of America, LLC. Not only does it produce some of the most amazing trilobites found in the US, but outstanding new contributions continue to be made to science.

The limestones of this quarry produce arguably the best preserved trilobites in the United States, many of them perfectly three-dimensional with no compaction at all. These include types like Ceraurus, Isotelus, Flexicalymene, Sphaerocoryphe, and many more. Collecting the Walcott-Rust quarry is brutally hard. It requires extracting large blocks of solid limestone, often weighing several hundred pounds, using massive pry bars, 20-pound sledge hammers, wedges, a lot of brute force, and rock quarrying know-how. These large blocks are then broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, looking for cross sections of the black trilobites in the black rock (a nearly impossible task). When a trilobite is found the real work begins, painstakingly extracting it from its limestone tomb under high-powered microscope using air scribes and abrasives.

Dan Cooper breaks up a block of limestone with a 20-pound sledge in search of Isotelus
Dan Cooper breaks up a block of limestone with a 20-pound sledge in search of Isotelus
SOLD
DETAILS
SPECIES
Ceraurus pleurexanthemus & Unidentified Bryozoan
LOCATION
Walcott-Rust Quarry, Russia, New York
FORMATION
Trenton Group, Rust Formation, Spillway Member
SIZE
Large Trilobite 1.5" long, Plate 19x13"
SUB CATEGORY
ITEM
#70577
GUARANTEE
We guarantee the authenticity of all of our
specimens. Read more about our
Authenticity Guarantee.