Drotops Trilobite Fossil Specimen 1

Everything about trilobites is cool, and we could spend hours going on and on about them. We don’t think you want to read a book, so we’ll just try to hit the highlights. A Drotops trilobite is a genus of trilobite that lived during the Devonian Period, roughly 419 to 359 million years ago. These ancient marine arthropods are especially famous for their large, highly detailed compound eyes, which are some of the most impressive ever found in trilobites. Fun fact: trilobites are the only known animals to have eyes made with calcite lenses. Yes, like the crystal calcite. How cool is that? Their compound eyes were built from tiny lenses made of calcite, a transparent form of calcium carbonate. Each lens sat on top of a photoreceptor cell beneath the exoskeleton. Because trilobite shells were already made largely of calcite, their eye lenses were essentially part of the mineralized exoskeleton. Most well known Drotops fossils, including this particular one, come from Morocco, where Devonian marine sediments preserved trilobites in remarkable detail. These ancient marine arthropods once thrived on Earth roughly 419 to 359 million years ago. They predate the dinosaurs, with a gap of roughly 20 million years between the extinction of trilobites and the appearance of the first dinosaurs. There were billions of trilobites crawling around our planet until the Permian-Triassic extinction event, ominously known as “The Great Dying.” No one really knows exactly what happened, but scientists believe a combination of massive volcanic eruptions, extreme climate change, ocean acidification, and low oxygen levels in the oceans caused the event. These environmental changes devastated marine ecosystems during the mass extinction. Considering the scale of that extinction, you probably won’t be shocked to hear that trilobites do not have any direct living descendants today. Their closest living relatives are thought to be arthropods, the large group that includes horseshoe crabs, spiders, and crustaceans. Sadly, we don’t think we’ll ever see a resurgence of calcite-eyed sea bugs, but nature has a way of surprising even the most astute among us. Guess we’ll have to wait a few million years to find out.