Trilobite

By Richard Fortey,

Book cover of Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution

Book description

With Trilobite, Richard Fortey, paleontologist and author of the acclaimed Life, offers a marvelously written, smart and compelling, accessible and witty scientific narrative of the most ubiquitous of fossil creatures.

Trilobites were shelled animals that lived in the oceans over five hundred million years ago. As bewilderingly diverse then as…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Trilobite as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I love this book because of the author’s infectious passion for fossils and geology. 

The book reads like a detective story, with the innermost secrets of long-extinct animal groups unveiled bit by bit by a master of forensic paleontology.

When I was an undergraduate student over 40 years ago, Richard showed us behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum in London. What I remember most was him describing how long it took his team to reveal just one trilobite eye. Only after many months of painstaking attention to detail were they finally able to work out how a trilobite…

Richard Fortey, a renowned paleontologist and acclaimed science writer, uses trilobites – those marvelous multi-limbed denizens of Paleozoic seas – to explain how fossils illuminate the past.  Fortey has studied trilobites for decades, and his expertise shines through on every page.  At the same time, his skills as a storyteller bring these ancient arthropods and the worlds they inhabited to vivid life. An enjoyable way to learn how paleontologists think. 

From Andrew's list on fossils and the history of life.

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