Trilobites of New York by Thomas Whiteley, Gerald Kloc and Carlton Brett, Cornell University Press, $55, ISBN 0801439698 Reviewed by Richard Fortey
ONCE amazingly abundant and varied, trilobites have been described as “the beetles of the Palaeozoic”. They swarmed in their millions in and round the seas of the early Cambrian, 545 million years ago, to the end of the Permian, when they became extinct, occupying many of the ecological niches now taken by crustaceans. The world was all the poorer for their passing.
For the past 150 years, one of the great hot spots for trilobite fossils has been…
