Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. Richard Fortey

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      It might seem an odd ambition to try to get everyone to pronounce a word correctly. But mine has always been to get the world to say ‘trilobite’ without fudging, and with a certain measure of understanding. My own mother was wont to say ‘troglodyte’, which at least has a certain prehistoric dimension, even if it refers to human cave dwellers rather than extinct arthropods several hundred million years older than humans. ‘Did you have a nice week with the troglodytes, dear?’ was one of her regular enquiries. A rather more common mispronunciation is ‘tribolites’ – an anagram of the correct word for sure, but probably an unconscious hommage to one of the humanoid tribes on Star Trek. ‘The tribolites have made it through the air lock, Captain. Permission to use phasers!’ I have no particular gripe against those who pronounce the word with a first syllable to rhyme with ‘thrill’, although I have always said ‘try-low-bites’ myself. The tri- part, of course, refers to the threefold division into which the calcareous carapaces of these animals are usually obviously divided lengthways – ‘three lobes’. On their underside, but rarely preserved, were many jointed legs of typical creepy-crawly kind, which reveal the trilobites to have been distant cousins of the crabs, butterflies, spiders and millipedes, with which they should be classified – in Linnaean terms, Phylum Arthropoda, Class Trilobita. For getting on for three hundred million years trilobites swarmed in the oceans, moulting and mating, and left behind their hard carapaces in the rocks as testimony to their former importance. At the moment we know something like five thousand genera of trilobites, and new species are being discovered entombed in ancient sediments such as limestones and shales. It is not surprising that they have been described as the ‘beetles of the Palaeozoic’. In fact, they still have a long way to go before they approach the beetles in biodiversity, but they are wonderfully varied creatures despite their simple ground plan, some with carapaces as smooth as beans, others like arthropodan porcupines, many as large as lobsters, yet others as tiny as water fleas. They evolved fast and are not uncommon fossils, so that they are useful in dating rocks – somebody who ‘knows his bugs’ should be able to say within a few minutes whether he is looking at Cambrian or Devonian examples; with more study the time zone can be narrowed further. Trilobites can tell about ancient climates, because different species lived in tropical as opposed to cool seas. They can tell us about vanished continents in distant eras, since different trilobites characterized different parts of the world. Study of apparently esoteric extinct animals can help us reconstruct the history of our planet.

      A few years ago I wrote an account of recent discoveries of remarkable trilobites in the Devonian rocks of Morocco, dating from more than four hundred million years ago. I included an illustration of a bizarre creature that carried a trident on its head, as far as I know a unique structure in the whole animal kingdom. In 2000 this trilobite had no scientific name, although it was already possible to buy specimens of it over the internet. My colleague Pierre Morzadec named the trident-bearing genus Walliserops in 2001, commemorating a well-known Devonian specialist, Professor Otto Walliser of the University of Göttingen. In 2005 I went to Morocco to see the localities where these trilobites had been discovered. Brian Chatterton of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada has been making a study of the trilobite sites in the Anti-Atlas for several years, and he invited me to join his field party that spring. Trilobites have become a major industry in the area around the small town of Erfoud, which had previously subsisted on a little bit of tourism to add to the small rewards provided by dates and agriculture. Mr Hammi was our guide and mentor; he is a helpful local Berber with no scientific training but a hugely intelligent ‘eye’ for a good trilobite. Since these trilobites have to be laboriously prepared out of the rock by hand, Hammi has made a successful family business with his brother supplying splendid specimens that have finished up in collections around the world. He has partly been equipped with microscopes and tools by an English fossil dealer from Cambridge, Brian Eberhardie, who also sold on some of the best examples. I might add that there are several other successful businesses producing cheap fakes. The localities in question are dotted over one of the most barren desert regions in which I have ever worked. It seems that the High Atlas Mountains steal all the water, leaving but a trickle for the Sahara side. But the barren hillsides of the Anti-Atlas provide perfect exposure of the rock formations. This is what geologists call ‘layer cake’ stratigraphy, where each stratum is horizontal, or gently tilted, so that climbing up a hillside from stratum to stratum is equivalent to climbing a staircase upwards through geological time. A productive layer can be traced over a long distance, or at least until a stretch of stony desert interrupts the outcrop. We went to an isolated hill called Zguilma, where trident trilobites had been collected over several years. There was actually a tree or two at the foot of the hill, tapped deep into some tiny source of water. Even in the cooler part of the year their shade was difficult to resist at three in the afternoon; in the summer it must have been impossible to work in the open.

      The extraordinary sight that greeted us at Zguilma was a trilobite mine. The productive layer had been traced all along the bottom of the hillside and dug out in a series of trenches and pits, flanked by piles of debris. When Hammi arrived, muffled shouts in Arabic sounded from a hole, and out climbed a cadaverous old man with one or two yellow teeth displayed in a broad grin. He had been ten feet down in the hole in the full heat for several hours breaking hard limestone rocks. It was like being employed in Hades, with added hard labour. Mysteriously, the old man seemed cheerful enough. He was the beginning of the chain of discovery, for if he broke across one of the precious trilobites he would put both ‘halves’ on one side, and Hammi would pay him modestly for the find. Then it would be taken on to the laboratory for preparation, and if a good trilobite were extracted, might eventually fetch up at the Houston Fossil Show or some similar event carrying a price tag of several thousand dollars. The wizened old man seemed untroubled by the chain that led to Houston, and was doubtless unaware of the profit differential; he was glad of a break to share the sweet mint tea that is the social lubricant in the desert (‘Berber Whisky’ is a joke for the infidel). Every evening, in the incomparably still dusk that comes in the desert, we would all share tajine made from tough old bits of meat that had spent the day hanging on string between the branches of the token tree, mopped up with Moroccan bread cooked in warm embers. We had the same bread for breakfast spread with ‘La vache qui rit’ processed cheese. After a couple of weeks the diet began to pall. I have been allergic to laughing cows ever since.