Book - The Back to the Past Museum Guide to Trilobites II

We are proud to be the North American home of Enrico Bonino and Carlo Kier’s newest book: The Back to the Past Museum Guide to Trilobites II. This 435 page, hard-cover book takes the reader through all aspects of trilobite life over their 300 million years in the Earth’s oceans, from the first ever to appear in the Cambrian to the final extant members of the Permian. It expands upon the authors’ seminal 2010 work, The Back to the Past Museum Guide to TRILOBITES (originally published in Italian as Trilobiti: il Libro del Museo in 2009), including extensive updated sections on trilobites’ origins, morphology, and paleoecology. What Trilobites II shows about these creatures is just how extensive their reach really was: the formations Bonino and Kier cover in this book span the entire world. Specimens from BPM as well as the Smithsonian, the Geological Survey of Canada, Chicago’s Field Museum, and numerous spectacular private collections showcase the diversity of form trilobites have. It includes over 160 pages of gorgeous full-color photographs of these ancient arthropods, many from the museum’s own collection, organized by the formations in which they were discovered. It is an essential addition to any trilobite lover’s collection, be they a professional paleontologist or even a beginning collector, combining excellent science and compelling narration into one of the most comprehensive books on trilobites to date.

Trilobites are an extinct order of marine arthropods that inhabited every ecological niche of the world’s Paleozoic ocean beds for almost 300 million years, beginning with the Cambrian Explosion and finally dwindling during the Changhsingian Stage of the late Permian. They ranged from barely millimeters to almost a full meter in size, following herbivorous, carnivorous, or even detritivorous diets. Their exoskeletons were made from low-magnesium calcite, which holds up well to preservation and gives paleontologists such a rich diversity of forms to study. Trilobites are considered the most varied group of extinct organisms that ever lived on Earth: over 22,000 species have been described, and more are described every year.

The Back to the Past Museum is the world’s first museum dedicated solely to trilobites, located in Cancún, Mexico. Bornino is an Italian-born, Belgium-based cartographer with expensive digital publication experience. Kier is an avid trilobite collector who first found his love for them while working with the Milan Museum of Natural History in the 1970s and helped develop the BPM collection