Trilobite!

Fortey has a gift for bringing profound science grippingly to life for a general audience, and even the very best writers have admiration for his superlative literary craft. Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution is the latest book from the working palaeontologist, and it does not disappoint. Fortey's previous book was Life: An Unauthorized Biogrpahy, the 4,500-million-year history of our planet and its remarkable array of living inhabitants. Trilobite! tells a part of that story. The trilobites were animals that looked like giant woodlice. Denizens of the sea, they first evolved at least 540 million years ago. Trilobites were among the earliest animals to leave evidence of their passing, as fossils. They became extinct around 250 million years ago, during the so-called end Permian mass-extinction - a cataclysmic extinction that dwarfed the demise of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. Most people have seen the beautiful, polished fossils of trilobites in museums, rock shops and mantlepieces. Fortey came across them as a tender teenager and it was love at first sight. He grew up to be the trilobite specialist at the Natural History Museum in London: Trilobite! tells the 300-million-year history of the lives and times of the trilobites, and records a personal obsession. More than any other science, palaeontology has scenery, and Fortey describes his quest to find trilobites from the deserts of Morocco to the glaciers of Spitzbergen. He also explains what palaeontologists actually do. Palaeontologists are voyagers on a ocean of time. Unlike every other commuter on the 8.02 to Waterloo, Fortey will spend his working day exploring vistas of the deep past, worlds as strange and remote as anything in science fiction or poetry. In Trilobite! he invites you to share the ride. Review by HENRY GEE (Kirkus UK)