3.1" Crotalocephalina Trilobite - Atchana, Morocco

Crotalocephalina Trilobite - Atchana, Morocco #87022

This is a 3.1" long, Crotalocephalina trilobite collected near Atchana, Morocco. It's been prepared to remove the surrounding limestone so that it looks like it's ready to crawl off the rock.

Preparation is a bit rough leaving some scratches on the shell and there is some shell restoration on the front of the head. There is a natural fault filled with calcite running through the tail which has caused a shift in the fossil.

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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