# Devonian Trilobite Plate

> A trilobite curled in dark Moroccan stone, some 390 million years old, its compound eyes still legible under a loupe. A paperweight with the longest of memories.

Price: 38.00 USD · in stock

## About
Mid-afternoon, a pause at the desk, and under your hand a creature that lived some 390 million years ago. This dark plate holds the curled, segmented body of a trilobite some four inches long. Under a loupe its compound eyes are still legible, hundreds of tiny lenses in their original crescent, and the thorax shows every rib of the exoskeleton in relief.It is heavier than its size suggests, with a cool, faintly gritty face and a matrix dark enough to read as slate. The specimen is Devonian, quarried from the dark shales near Alnif in Morocco's Anti-Atlas range, where family workshops still split the rock by hand and free each fossil with needle and air-scribe rather than acid. No two plates split the same way.Trilobites were gathered long before they were understood. Ute tradition in the American West is said to have prized them as protective charms, drilled and strung on cord; old collectors simply called them bug stones.DetailsFossil trilobite in a dark stone plate, MoroccoDevonian, about 390 million years oldTrilobite about four inches longFreed by hand with needle and air-scribeSet it flat on a desk or shelf, and let it remind you now and then that most of what has ever lived is already stone.