3.6" Alien-Looking Quadrops Trilobite - Spectacular Preparation

Alien-Looking Quadrops Trilobite - Spectacular Preparation #222208

This is a spectacular specimen of one of my favorite species of trilobites, the very alien looking Quadrops flexuosa. This bizarre trilobite has a distinctive four-forked protrusion coming off of the front of it's head which is where the genus gets it's name. It is not only a rare trilobite but extremely hard and time consuming to prepare owing to the hardness of the rock and the its many free standing spines.

This specimen is visually stunning and very large for the species at 3.6" long. It has been prepared so that all the spines are free-standing and it "flies" above the limestone. This is a very delicate and time consuming process. This trilobite almost certainly took over 100 hours of preparation time under microscope by one of the most skilled preparitors int he world. Best of all it has NO RESTORATION. They don't come better than this.

Trilobites were a very diverse group of extinct marine arthropods. They first appeared in the fossil record in the Early Cambrian (521 million years ago) and went extinct during the Permian mass extinction (250 million years ago). They were one of the most successful of the early animals on our planet: over 25,000 species have been described, filling nearly every evolutionary niche. Due in large part to their hard exoskeletons (shells), they left an excellent fossil record.