Rating: 
Summary: Short, sweet and to the point....
Review: TRILOBITE is for those who love prehistory and paleontology but don't want to read big fusty tomes written by obtuse learned men (and women). I suppose most folks younger than me came across trilobites in grade school, my daughter certainly did. I first discovered them when she was in fourth grade and had an assignment on the little creatures. Actually, I thought they were little until I read Fortey's book and discovered there were hundreds of species ranging from gnat-sized to stingray sized. My daughter's class had a field trip to the Smithsonian, and it was there I became overwhelmed by trilobites. I will never forget the shock of walking into that museum the first time and seeing the story of evolution laid out and the exhibits of the Cambrian, Silurian, and other eras. Why the shock? Because I grew up in the South, and having had "Bible Study" in place of science, I had no idea evolution existed. The trilobite was my introduction to the story of evolution. Well, that was many years ago, and now I have years of education behind me (I went back to school) but still I love to read about trilobites. Fortey apparently has a background in geology and I found his discussions of land forms quite interesting. It's amazing to think the Appalacian chain which extends from Canada to Geogia was created millions of years ago and that part of this mountain range may be found in Europe. He explains how the fossil record (especially the part containing trilobites) can be used to link the world's surface areas. For example, by matching the various fossils (trilobite species), paleontologists have been able to link Newfoundland with the North Sea. Fortey discusses a reformulation in the theory of evolution that somewhat abandons the notion of "progress" and replaces it with the notion of "punctuated equilibrium." Creatures evolve but it isn't always "forward" as some scientists once thought. They sometimes adapt to hostile conditions and in the process lose a former trait. For example, while most trilobites seem to have had eyes, blind species apparently evolved from sighted ones. Fortey says he has almost given up hope of finding a living trilobite in an abyss in the ocean, but the horseshoe crab and scorpions and other arthropods may be the related to the fossil trilobites. If so, the trilobites have not become extinct, just adapted to new circumstances. The only misgiving I have about Fortey's book is that he does persist in calling the Middle Ages the Dark Ages. Historians now know that a great deal of "science" occurred during the Middle Ages and although practices such as autopsies might have been disapproved by church leaders, their disapproval was no more invasive than government intervention today in areas involving stem cell research, fertility issues, cloning, and AIDS. In every era there have been ethical issues that lead people to take differing positions. Fortey is apparently 100 percent for science which is his perogative.
Rating: 
Summary: A tour of the life of trilobites and those that study them
Review: What a lot of fun! Richard Fortey takes us on an adventure that began about 500 million years ago. He uses his lifetime of experience and study to share with us the amazing things scientists have learned about trilobites over the past 300 years. Not only are there more kinds of trilobites than I had ever imagined, scientists have figured out more about their lives (as species not as individuals) than I would have ever believed possible. It is just incredible. But the book isn't just about trilobites. The author shares wonderful stories from his own life and the lives of those that have spent their lives learning about these creatures. We also get to learn about science and the various arguments that have arisen over the centuries and how they were resolved (or continue to this day). The author even throws a yellow flag on a heated debate between the now sadly late Steven Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris for becoming unprofessionally vitriolic. This is a fabulous book for anyone who wants to read a non-technical book about natural history. It is written with great style and a deft touch that never overwhelms the non-specialist nor becomes so frothy that it loses the ability to communicate serious and wonderful things. I think this would be an especially wonderful book for young people to read who are interested in science and want to learn more about what it is and what a life spent studying science is really about and what it is like. Fortey demonstrates clearly the work involved, the rigors required, and the where the rewards are. Reading this book made me wish I knew where I put that trilobite head and tail I found in an Ohio quarry when I was a boy. It makes me want to go out with a geologists hammer and find some more. Maybe it will inspire some young men and women to take that inspiration more seriously and take it on as a career. Just great. Thanks, Dr. Fortey.
Rating:
Summary: A tour of the life of trilobites and those that study them
Review: What a lot of fun! Richard Fortey takes us on an adventure that began about 500 million years ago. He uses his lifetime of experience and study to share with us the amazing things scientists have learned about trilobites over the past 300 years. Not only are there more kinds of trilobites than I had ever imagined, scientists have figured out more about their lives (as species not as individuals) than I would have ever believed possible. It is just incredible. But the book isn't just about trilobites. The author shares wonderful stories from his own life and the lives of those that have spent their lives learning about these creatures. We also get to learn about science and the various arguments that have arisen over the centuries and how they were resolved (or continue to this day). The author even throws a yellow flag on a heated debate between the now sadly late Steven Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris for becoming unprofessionally vitriolic. This is a fabulous book for anyone who wants to read a non-technical book about natural history. It is written with great style and a deft touch that never overwhelms the non-specialist nor becomes so frothy that it loses the ability to communicate serious and wonderful things. I think this would be an especially wonderful book for young people to read who are interested in science and want to learn more about what it is and what a life spent studying science is really about and what it is like. Fortey demonstrates clearly the work involved, the rigors required, and the where the rewards are. Reading this book made me wish I knew where I put that trilobite head and tail I found in an Ohio quarry when I was a boy. It makes me want to go out with a geologists hammer and find some more. Maybe it will inspire some young men and women to take that inspiration more seriously and take it on as a career. Just great. Thanks, Dr. Fortey.
Rating: 
Summary: Eccentric, but highly readable.
Review: When I read the introduction to one of Fortey's earlier books, Hidden Landscape, I immediately realised that here was someone who truly understands how it feels to hammer open a rock and discover some treasure within. However, the introductory chapter of Trilobite, which involves an over-extended parable about some Thomas Hardy character, exceeded some kind of threshold in my mind and became, simply, florid. Fortunately, the introduction is soon over and we jump into some very lightly technical details about the beasts themselves: a field in which Fortey is, justly, considered pre-eminent. "So in just eight technical terms - cephalon, thorax, pygidium, segment, axis, pleura, glabella, eyes - it is possible to begin to embrace the form of these strange animals. To be able to name the parts introduces a certain familiarity. Further, to be competent to recognise the glabella for what it is means that it does not take long to see that one trilobite has a glabella which is quite different from that of another. With language comes discrimination." - p. 29 Three of the early chapters are organised along morphological lines - Shells, Legs, and Crystal Eyes - each describing important parts of the creatures' anatomy. It is in the legs chapter, perhaps appropriately, that Fortey really hits his straps with a 'parade' of common trilobites, lasting a few pages, from the most ancient to the last of their kind. Each is summed up in a few (too few, for me) sentences, sketching the history of their discovery and a quirky description, of sorts. To give you a taste of what you're in for, here's Olenellus: "The widest part of the animal is at the head end where there are prominent spines at either corner, behind which the body tapers gradually backwards along a thorax comprising many, rather flat segments with prominently spiny tips. ... Somehow this looks like a primitive trilobite. It has not yet developed the sutures crossing the headshield that helped its relatives during molting." - pp. 69-70 The eyes chapter begins with the brief exposition of a highly unlikely notion - some bizarre spin-off of Gould's "re-played tape" nonsense - to the effect that, but for historical accident, the sense of sight might not have evolved: "the inevitability of vision is ... uncertain" (p. 79). Well, I think that's just rubbish and Fortey should stick to what he knows. There is zero likelihood of a world ruled by, say, smell because - moths notwithstanding - it just isn't a very useful sense. I could go on about the relationship between wavelength and resolution, but the reader would be better served by Richard Feynman; try The Character of Physical Law for an excellent starter. (Hint: The wavelength of some aromatic molecule with an atomic weight in the bazillions, wafting around in the atmosphere, is not small.) Fortunately one has to endure only a page of this before the author is back among the fields he knows - HOX genes, in this particular instance. Next appears a rather exotic chapter, Exploding Trilobites, dealing ostensibly with the Cambrian explosion but in actuality with several of the personalities involved in the debate - Gould, the McMenamins ... - and includes his now, surely, infamous denunciation of Simon Conway Morris. The second half of the book, which I will skip over much more briefly, provides a quirky though fascinating insight into some of the actual daily work of a researcher like Fortey; an anthropic but useful discussion of stratigraphy and, unusually in a book like this, extinction. This is followed up by a rare and interesting look at the difficulties of paleogeography in a chapter called Possible Worlds. Finally, oddly cheek-by-jowl in the penultimate chapter, we are treated to a discussion of ontogeny - how little trilobites grew up into big trilobites - and a chronologically arranged review of trilobite evolution. Ultimately, though, I can only give it three stars. I didn't learn **enough** - I didn't learn nearly as much as I expected. Having read a whole book on the one subject, written by one of the field's foremost authorities, I feel no better prepared to tackle the professional trilobite literature than when I began. Disappointing, that is. (Look and Feel: Hardback; good quality paper with high resolution b&w photographs on the pages and some b&w plates; indexed. Authoritative, and with the weight and feel of a good text book, but by no means written like one.)
Rating:
Summary: Utterly delightful book on all things trilobite
Review: _Trilobite_ by Richard Fortey is a wonderful, witty, charming, very well-written, and very richly illustrated homage to the trilobite, an arthropod that teemed in the millions in the seas of the ancient earth for 300 million years before becoming extinct. Fortey is an enthusiastic expert on all things trilobite - having studied them for over 30 years - and did an excellent job in conveying his passion for these long extinct creatures in a very readable format with many dozens of excellent photographs and sketches.
Early on Fortey introduced basic concepts of trilobite anatomy (he said eight technical names is all anyone needs to describe any species). With the help of a diagram of a representative species, we learn for instance that the head is properly termed the cephalon while the other end -the tail - is called the pygidium. Between the cephalon and the pygidium is the thorax, which is subdivided into segments (thoracic segments). A central convex portion or lobe running down the thorax and pygidium is called the axis, while to either side are the lateral or pleural parts.
Reading about trilobite eyes was particular fascinating; they were made of calcite (the same substance that makes up the white cliffs of Dover and was popular in classical architecture), something unique in the entire animal kingdom. Fortey discussed the physics and chemistry of the crystal eyes of trilobites, how they enabled the animal to see, how the lenses on trilobite eyes were arranged and how they functioned, the unique optical properties of calcite, even experiments replicating the vision of individual trilobite species (in particular the experiments relating to the vision of _Phacops_ were extremely interesting; I never knew that physics had such a place in paleontology).
We learn also that while whole trilobites are certainly found in the fossil record (or more accurately the carapace of the animal, as the soft and delicate parts such as the legs only rarely fossilize) much of what is found are only bits and pieces, often shed when molting. Thoracic segments, pygidium, and other parts litter the fossil record like puzzle pieces and it is often the job of the trilobite expert to reassemble them, much like a jigsaw puzzle. Some fossils sites - such as Beecher's Trilobite Bed, an Ordovician fossil site in New York - have preserved through unusual circumstances such delicate trilobite parts as their legs (long a mystery to researchers) and even antennae. The details about the life of the trilobite found there - genus _Triarthus_- was fascinating; apparently they lived in a very low oxygen, high sulfur seafloor environment and may have perished during a fatal drop of dissolved oxygen (and were thus preserved) but otherwise lived symbiotically with bacteria that derived energy from sulfur.
Fortey introduced the reader to a wonderful parade of trilobite species, relating the history of the group from the Cambrian to its final days in the Permian (the true Age of Trilobites he wrote ranged from the middle of the Cambrian to the Ordovician). We find that trilobites lived in diverse habitats, from the shallowest "sands to the deepest-water shales; in sunlit reefs and in gloomy abysses." _Olenellus_ for instance is the commonest of the earliest Cambrian trilobites, a creature the size of a large lobster that was a voracious predator 535 million years ago. _Agnostus_ was a tiny, millimeters long trilobite that swarmed in the millions, odd creatures that only had two thoracic segments and was so abundant that some late Cambrian limestones are made of nothing but this tiny trilobite. _Elrathia kingi_ is the commonest of the "rock shop" Cambrian trilobites, a "middle-of-the road" typical trilobite, one of many dozens of very broadly similar trilobites that make specialists gnash their teeth. This species has been known to leave tracks that have been fossilized, one of the true "mud-grubbers" that plowed furrows in seafloor sediment in its quest for food. _Parabarrandia_ was a streamlined, torpedo shaped Ordovician trilobite, a species that Fortey had performed experiments on in a water tank with dye to prove that it was well suited to a free-swimming role (I never thought one could do experiments on a trilobites; that was fascinating to read). Another free-swimmer was the giant-eyed _Opipeuter_ (Greek for "one who gazes") from the Ordovician, with eyes oriented to see forwards and backwards and a body plan designed to house powerful swimming muscles. Also from the Ordovician was _Isotelus_, an unusual animal which completely lacked eyes and had a head surrounded by a border full of perforations, not unlike a colander. This pitted fringe lay about the front of the head sort of like a halo, a rather complicated bit of Paleozoic engineering, the function of which has remained an enigma. The Devonian abounded in trilobites covered in prickles and spines (possibly related to the dominance of fish); one, _Dicranurus_, among its spines appeared to have had great curling ram horns originating at the neck.
As fascinating as trilobites are, Fortey had encountered those that question why he has devoted his life to their study. The author made an excellent case that knowledge of trilobites has played vital roles in the debates over the origins of new species and the nature of evolution itself (researches have been able to track changes in trilobite species over time thanks to their great abundance in the fossil record) and in the study of the positioning of ancient continents (as it has been discovered that trilobites make excellent index fossils, not only for marking intervals of geologic time but also to mark the shores of ancient continents, enabling or aiding in the mapping of the ancient world; indeed Fortey himself named an Ordovician ocean, Tornquist's Sea, which separated the continents of Avalonia and Baltica, thanks to trilobites). Fortey weighed in also in such divisive concepts in evolution as gradualism versus punctuated equilibria, the nature of the Cambrian explosion (and what trilobites tell us about that), the origin of eyes in animals, and the importance (and proper interpretation) of the weird Burgess Shale fauna.
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