[Rockhounds] Most pristine trilobite fossils ever found shake up scientific understanding of the long extinct group

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Researchers have described some of the best-preserved three-dimensional
trilobite fossils ever discovered. The fossils, which are more than 500
million years old, were collected in the High Atlas of Morocco and are
being referred to by scientists as "Pompeii" trilobites due to their
remarkable preservation in ash.

The paper, "Rapid volcanic ash entombment reveals the 3D anatomy of
Cambrian trilobites," was published
<https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl4540> in the journal,
*Science*.

The trilobites, from the Cambrian period, have been the subject of research
by an international team of scientists, led by Prof Abderrazak El Albani, a
geologist based at University of Poitiers and originally from Morocco. The
team included Dr. Greg Edgecombe, a paleontologist at the Natural History
Museum.

Dr. Greg Edgecombe said, "I've been studying trilobites for nearly 40
years, but I never felt like I was looking at live animals as much as I
have with these ones. I've seen a lot of soft anatomy of trilobites, but
it's the 3D preservation here that is truly astounding.

"An unexpected outcome of our work is discovering that volcanic ash
<https://phys.org/tags/volcanic+ash/> in shallow marine settings could be a
bonanza for exceptional fossil preservation."

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-pristine-trilobite-fossils-scientific-extinct.html