Trilobite, Eyewitness to Evolution

Well well well...hello Alex. I agree with you that humans can be vain at times...they want to try and do everything themselves and think they will succeed without God...which I agree is vain. In science, however, they must have a go of it alone. It is not as if they can simply pray before conducting each experiment now is it?

This topic has drifted off of its moorings and floated down the Hudson.
Lets get back to it.

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I recently read Trilobite, Eyewitness to Evolution by Richard Fortey, 2001. I found it to be a delightful read and I learned all sorts of new things about these fascinating fossil creatures and the worlds they inhabited for 300 million years. Many thousands of species have been described and more are being discovered every year.
Trilobites have played a major role in paleontology and have been used as index fossils correlating the ages of geological layers around the globe.

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They range in size from larger than lobsters to only a couple millimeters in length. As would be expected in a group that lasted that long the amount of variation is staggering; all the way from blind to calcium carbonate crystal for lenses in the faceted eyes, from plain and unadorned to covered with all sorts and shapes of spines.

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Fortey writes as much about the world they live in as about the trilobites themselves, the other sorts of life they shared the seas with. He uses his own experiences on expeditions of discovery around the world to tell the stories of the fossils and the types and locations of geological formations they are found in today and what those habitats were like when these creatures lived.

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He was a contemporary with Gould and Eldredge and describes how Eldredge's study of trilobites led him to the concept of Punctuated Equilibrium. He also explains Gould's errors in Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History in a way I had never understood before.

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Fortey tells an engrossing tale and describes the same excitement of discovery that I have experienced and observed in my colleagues in the study of dragonflies.

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I can recommend this book to anyone looking for an interesting read this winter.

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