Trilobite! : Eyewitness to Evolution

Rating:
Summary: A very enjoyable, instructive, and thought provoking book!
Review: The exclamation mark in the title of this delightful book is the first clue that Fortey is very enthusiastic about his topic. Fortey (Natural History Museum, London) is one of the world's top experts on trilobites, those mysterious and strangely attractive extinct arthropods from the Paleozoic. This book is his tribute to these fossils and what they tell about ancient worlds and evolution. Virtually everything anyone would want to know about trilobites is included here, from the history of their discovery through their intricate anatomy to their roles in long-gone ecosystems. In some sections the prose is equivalent to that of Lewis Thomas and other superb nature writers. The chapter on the "crystal eyes" of trilobites is especially well done, combining principles of optics with the wonder of vision, and emphasizing the uniqueness of trilobites in life's history. Trilobites prove to be remarkable templates for discussions of diversification, cladistics, taxonomy, and paleoecology . Readers will learn as much about the science of paleontology as they will about trilobites themselves. The numerous black-and-white photographs and line drawings make the descriptions and arguments easy to follow. Fortey's wit, knowledge, and high spirits are evident on every page. Highly recommended for any library. All levels.

Rating:
Summary: boring; watery; too much about author's life
Review: The information in "Trilobite!" is like raisins in the dough of digressions. Before you find out the names of the parts of a trilobite body, you'll have to read thirty pages of something like this:

(chapter Discovery) "This," our professor said, "is the most important and characteristic part of the trilobite -- the glabella." No familiar ring to this word, it just had to be learned. It had the small advantage of rhyming with "umbrella" -- and undergraduates are fond of such aides-memoires, even if they are harder to remember than the original thing to be memorized. The glabella was traversed by furrows that suggested that there was more than one segment in the cephalon, just as in the thorax and pygidium. However, ...

So you see, instead of showing you a drawing of the glabella and moving on, you have to read all this nonsense (and _then_ you get a drawing).

There are plenty of trilobite descriptions: this one's pleural region is kind of embossed, and this thorax has thirteen ridges, while that one had only eleven, and the cranidium is roundish... All this appears in plain text -- am I supposed to reconstruct 3D trilobites in my head from these descriptions? When not describing trilobites or naming ancient earth's periods, author engates in pompous rhetoric:

(from summary) "I have been waving the continents past, ten million years at a shot, with a flick of my wrist."

(chapter Time) "Mortality makes time our master, yet we continue to pretend that we can bend time to our will: we make time for things, people are said to die before their time, as if we all, briefly, had a period when our existence and the time of it coincide perfectly, as with a surfer successfully mounting and moving with the curling crest of a wave."

Time for a sentimental break:

"This was the time I explored with a coal hammer at a period of my life when my voice just turned unreliably falsetto and baritone by turns. While others discovered girls, I discovered trilobites."

I give this book one star, because I can't stand whining sentimentality, high pretense and bad sense of humor. Find out about Trilobites from another source.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Literature, Intermittent Science
Review: The other reviewers are right, this is a well written book. However,I agonized over how many stars to give this book since if one is looking for a detailed account of what science can tell us about trilobites, this book will only be intermittently satifying. Fortey combines a detailed discussion about tribolite fossils and what may be deduced from those fossils with stories of his journey of discovery in learning about these fascinating creatures. He writes well in both areas, but in the end I found it frustrating to sort the information out of the travelogue.

Rating:
Summary: Fortey's Favorite Fossil
Review: The very best science book for laymen is the book that is written by an expert in a field about his favorite area of expertise. So it is a delight to read _Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution_ (Knopf) by Richard Fortey. Fortey is surely an expert; he is a senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, and has done extensive research in fossil fields all over the globe. His favorite specimens (he refers to them as "my animals") are trilobites, and reading his lucid, humorous, enthusiastic pages, one can certainly understand why.

Fortey writes with humor about his adventures in the field. He has hunted trilobites everywhere on the globe, in desert as well as arctic wastes. But of course, most of Fortey's book is about the trilobite itself. The name comes from it's three lobes, not head, thorax, and tail, but the central body axis flanked by the left and right pleural regions. It was originally thought to be some sort of flatfish, but as more specimens were found, it became clear that it was an arthropod, with the nearest living relative the horseshoe crab (although they look more like the woodlice or roly-poly bugs, and some balled up like them). What is generally fossilized in trilobites is the outer upper shell. The underside, with the legs, is thin cuticle that decomposed before fossilization could take place. It was only when specimens were found from a certain field in New York state that details of limbs became plain. Because of a peculiarity in the minerals of the area, the thin cuticle had become gilded with pyrites, fool's gold. Every segment was shown to have a pair of branched legs, and the creature even showed antennae. Fortey's chapter on trilobite eyes, the only ones ever to use calcite prisms for lenses, is amazing.

In Fortey's account, trilobites become interesting in themselves, but he clearly shows that they have larger importance. Trilobites were always marine, never freshwater, and they generally inhabited the coastal areas. Because of this, the outline of trilobites in what is now land shows where the coasts used to be. Trilobites help to track the movements of the continents as they split off and sailed to their current positions on the globe over millions of years. Fortey shows how tracking trilobites can sometimes top paleomagnetism as a way of documenting continental drift. In addition, trilobites serve as timekeepers. They are found all over the world and range through such times as Cambrian, Devonian, and Permian, and if you can confidently identify a trilobite, you can spot what range of times your rocks come from.

Trilobites lived for over three hundred million years (humans have been around about a thousandth of that time), so they had, as the British say, a very good innings. They have been gone for over two hundred and fifty million years, and yet in this fascinating book, they live still and, with help from a superb reporter, they have news to tell us.

Rating:
Summary: A delightful invitation, a disappointing primer
Review: This is a book with modest goals which fully achieves everything it sets out to do.

Anyone who was enamored of dinosaurs at six - which means all males and at least half the females in the Western world - will instantly recognize a trilobite. Most of us will know that they stuck around longer than the dinosaurs did, and died out before Barney's kin put in an appearance. And that's about it. To see a whole book devoted to trilobites (but a book so slim as to guarantee it will not daunt) naturally stirs a hope that one may extend one's long, arm's-length acquaintance to a kind of tentative intimacy.

By the time I was two chapters in to Fortey's book, I had grown pretty impatient. He was eminently readable, but the pace at which actual scientific information was being conveyed was glacial. It was as if he had spent a long life, most of it devoted to a passionate love affair with trilobites, trying to convey the flavor of his subject to literate, intelligent dinner companions with very short attention spans. The reader becomes one of those dinner companions. Fortey is an easygoing raconteur, never talking down to us and never wearying us with technical detail. By the time the book is over we've learned a fair amount about trilobites, quite a bit about their importance within the larger evolutionary scheme of things, and quite a bit about what it is like to be part of the small worldwide society of dedicated trilobite hunters.

Given how frustrated I was at the early pacing, it was a nice surprise to look back at the end and realize how much more I knew about these ancient arthropods than when I'd started. But among the many things I had expected to learn, and had not, were basic topics like: how does one actually go about liberating a specimen from the rock? What are the major orders of trilobites? If I'm looking at one, how do I begin to locate it within the classificatory scheme, or within the geological timeline? Where do I start reading if I want to learn more?

So if you want to while away the time with some engaging light scientific reading, this may be the book for you. If you want to persuade an initially indifferent friend to warm up to the idea of learning something about fossil invertebrates, this might be the book to lend out. But if you want to get a solid basic overview of the trilobite world, I can't help feeling there've got to be better places to go. Still, until I learn what those are, I'm happy enough to have gone to Fortey's book.

Rating:
Summary: A Gem: Puts mystery, romance & discovery back into science
Review: This is a remarkable book that will introduce you to the process of science and a fascinating aspect of the emergence of life. Trilobites are among the best fossils for children to get to know because they are very distinct (the tri lobed shells) and very different from anything currently living (the horseshoe crab on American Atlantic beaches is comparable in unique appearance and attracts children with similar fascination).

For those who want a better system of American science education, Fortey gives some powerful hints. Consider his language: "The fever of discovery was upon me.... I found a trilobite...the textbook came alive...this was my first discovery of the animals that would change my life (p.18)." He continues, "I knew, by some principle which I could not articulate, that the wider end was the head of the animal. And of course upon the head there were the eyes. Despite the unfamiliar conformation of the fossil I knew that eyes must always belong on heads. So despite the exoticism of the fossil there was already a common bond between me and the trilobite - we both had our heads screwed on the right way."(p.19)

Again and again Fortey reminds us that scientists grow from discovery, mystery, romance, intrigue, while the memorization comes later. He reminds us that there is an enormous amount we still do not know and in the process introduces us to a world we have never considered: "I want to invest the trilobite with all the glamour of the dinosaur and twice its endurance. I want you to see the world through the eyes of trilobites, to help you make a journey back through hundreds of millions of years...this will be an unabashedly trilobite-centric view of the world,"(p.19).

For anyone who wants to take a few hours to think different thoughts, to consider how brief our history has been and how successful other organisms have been, to contemplate the various catastrophic extinctions and their dramatic impact on life, to ask about life beyond the rush hour traffic and the monthly report, Fortey's work is a little gem of an introduction to a fascinating part of the world. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Another Winner from Richard Fortey
Review: This is a wonderful book! Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution is a skillfully crafted narrative that displays Fortey's impeccable scientific credentials and his engaging and highly entertaining style of writing. Readers unfamiliar with these remarkable creatures and their 300 million year history will benefit from well organized chapters that explain the physiology, life habits, evolutionary patterns and geological time line with insight and clarity. Those readers with a better understanding of the class Trilobita, will enjoy the personal observations and anecdotes of a superb writer, who just happens to be a leading authority on the subject. Fortey even tackles the role of ombudsman in his attempt to soften the contentious battles between Simon Conway-Morris and Stephen J. Gould over those controversial early arthropods and other creatures of arguable affinity. I applaud his restraint and gentle hand in dealing with the emotional fervor of his contemporaries. If I have any criticism of this book, it would be to step on to the soapbox and point out that Fortey details the moment when he chipped out his first trilobite at age fourteen as an epiphany that determined his lifes work. He discusses Walcott and other self taught geologists and paleontologists who started as eager young fossil hunters. Sadly, in several places throughout the text, Fortey explains that these sites are now closed to collecting. Typically, these closures are to protect the area from the hammers of interested collectors (with special emphasis on those who might profit from the sale of their collections) in the misguided notion that invertebrate fossils are national treasures that must be protected for all through restrictions and the intervention of government agencies. I subscribe to the belief that a fossil left uncollected is a fossil that is lost. The search for specimens, even for profit, benefits us all. In the final pages of his book, Fortey marvels at the recently discovered trident Comura trilobite. I only wish he'd made it clear that this unique fossil discovery resulted from the activities of Moroccans digging the Devonian strata for profit and that future fossil wonders, as well as future paleontologists, are much more likely to occur when people are allowed to explore the rocks as Fortey was allowed to do in his youth.

Rating:
Summary: A Romp among the Trilobites
Review: This is an excellent book from the point of view of the elucidation of the life of 300 million years of trilobites as well as the view of the discovery process in science. Fortey gives a lucid account, that is funny also, of his involvement in his life work on trilobites. He describes the details of the structure of these invertebrates and how they evolved over time. Their remarkable diversity of structure allows them to be used for the elucidation of the evolutionary process as well as the construction of maps of the early world, which Fortey explains in charming detail. In the focus on the trilobite there is less said about the simultaneous evolution of the predators of the trilobites, such as the toothed fishes, and the eventual extinction of the trilobites. This is a great gift book for the young biological scientist and for the old ones also who love the process of discovery.

Rating:
Summary: Trilobite Science from an Expert in the Field.
Review: To my surprise Richard Fortey's Trilobite! turned out to be a rich and insightful book. Not many books have been written on this subject. If you are interested in paleontology and the trilobites then let me assure you that you will not be disappointed in this work. At first glance this subject may seem dry and uninteresting to some but Fortey who is a senior paleontologist and a curator at the Natural History Museum in London manages to curve out an entertaining plot that flows smoothly throughout. In Trilobite! you will treated to 16 pages of black-and-white (Color photos of fossils tell nothing of animal's realistic coloration, therefore, it is possible that Fortey decided to present them in this style. Perhaps, BW photos offer more detail) photos of fossilized trilobites, 40 illustrations including charts, maps and timelines. Fortey pays special attention to structure and function of trilobite's legs, eyes, shells, antennae and provides information on their habitat, climate of those periods, and feeding styles of the animals. What this book may be lacking is a set of color photos of virtual live trilobites.

I was delighted to finally learn in detail what Burgess Shale and Cambrian Explosion really were. Fortey wrote up a lucid history of science behind excavations and classifications of trilobites and scientists who worked and were involved in propelling this field.

Also, Fortey can definitely make his reader laugh from time to time. I was not distracted by his memories and other stories that he included in the work. He can give a good idea of what feels like to be a scientist.

All in all, this is a good presentation of the world of trilobites. It is a shame that so few books were written about the animals that endured approximately 300,000,000 years of existence on Earth. As Fortey puts it, we only survived ½ % of time of their dominion so far. I believe that richer works can be produced but for now we are left to enjoy this little gem.

Rating:
Summary: Popular science at its best
Review: TRILOBITE is an artfully conceived and beautifully written reflection on trilobites, evolution, and life. Personal experiences, biology, history, geology and (of course) paleontology are presented in a wonderful mix. Fortey waxes philosophical in parts without straying too far off subject. If you love learning about the amazing natural forces that have been in operation on our planet for the last 500 million years or so, you'll be captivated by this work. The book is aimed at a general audience and is neither dry nor patronizing. Very few technical terms are required and the 8 that are most important (names of the parts of trilobites) are immediately introduced and clearly explained.

So pick it up, sit back, and enjoy another Fortey journey through life's history.