Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Review: Trilobite!
Just finished this book today. Got to love the title: “Trilobite!” with a bang at the end. Somehow the title neatly encapsulates an inherent quirkiness in the book, which is about a now-extinct arthropod that looks a lot like a wood-louse, and is most closely related to the hermit crab among living relatives. Funny subject to devote a book to you might think, but as the subtitle of the book says, Trilobites were “Eyewitnesses to Evolution”, and as Fortey shows, much else besides.

I got interested in this book after reading a review of it in Scientific America, and makes for an interesting follow-up to the last book I read on a related subject area, which was Gould’s Wonderful Life, and along the way provides an interesting re-examination of the explosive evolution topic first covered by Gould after a dozen years of further investigation and reflection.

Fortey is a gifted writer – in fact I find Gould shrill in comparison. Fortey has a flair or description and while having a strong grounding in science, has obviously not lived his whole life in lab. Far from it in fact -- he talks about expeditions to digs in China, Wales, Newfoundland, Sweden and more. He continually makes interesting literary references; in the opening chapter to a Thomas Hardy story where a Trilobite features, or where a line from Shakespeare's Tempest (“the pearls that were his eyes”) is related to the unique crystalline eyes of the Trilobite. This is all really just to say that the man is literate, and has a wide range of metaphor and allusion to draw upon,

Okay, somehow am not getting a sense of the fun of the book. The author is excited about his subject matter – he’s been working with the fossils of these creatures for years and you can tell he still finds them fascinating. Their pervasive nature for hundreds of millions of years leads to interesting discussions about the nature of evolution, to their pivotal role in determining continental drift and the various scientific controversies that they have caused over the years. Science as a very human endeavour is shown in its various forms here as well: the close-knit community of Trilobite experts, the tragic death of a researcher who was consumed in the Holocaust, the promising career of a French expert which was scuttled by controversy (and who became a celebrated author), and the hopes. The author has himself delved and named seas that grew and closed again between continents themselves long transformed out of recognition, described the many ecological niches they lived in and had a number of the critters named after him to boot. And all of the various forms of the trilobite: growing up from a larvae, those mysterious eyes made of crystal, mapping evolution across eons, popping out in all their myriad shapes and forms after hibernating in stone for millions of years.

A captivating read. ;-)

My own connection to Trilobites began when I was a kid. I went to the R.O.M. and bought a small specimen they had for sale in their store. I was fascinated that I was holding in my hand something that lived millions of years ago. It lived in a time before the dinosaurs, it was once alive – and now it was a rock, and I felt privileged to have it. Since then I have been fascinated with fossils – things encapsulated in stone – and the feeling of seeing and holding mute witnesses to distant times and distant places. The person who has best captured this sense of mystery, and somehow foreboding is Christopher Dewdney’s poetry, such as A Palaeozoic Geology of London, Ontario or The Radiant Inventory: Poems. (Will have to revisit them). I have also long thought that a there’s so much more to know about the history of fossil life than the dinosaurs, who are relative newcomers in comparison to Trilobites. (Having said that, it is somewhat ironic that the most recent book I bought talks about dinosaurs, or more accurately, about the history of our knowledge of them).