Travels with Trilobites: Adventures in the Paleozoic by Andy Secher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Travels with Trilobites is full of unbridled enthusiasm that any trilobite aficionado will undoubtedly appreciate. And Andy Secher is absolutely a trilobite enthusiast — a field associate in paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and coeditor of their trilobite website, with his own quite impressive trilobite collection. It’s obvious that he would consider trilobites one of the best things since a few hundred million years before sliced bread, and he gladly includes many pictures from his own extensive collection of fossils: “They’re being displayed merely because of each trilobite’s inherent beauty and stunning strangeness, qualities that make them more than worthy of being seen, studied, collected, and admired.” 250 million years of trilobites ruling the seas — that makes us Homo Sapiens barely a blip on the life radar.
“From their initial moments on Earth some 521 million year ago, few animals were ever as evolutionarily “perfect” in their morphological design as that fascinating organism known as the trilobite.”
He lets his love of these weird Paleozoic creature shine throughout the book, and doesn’t stop even at Dad jokes to show how awesome he thinks they are (if you know me, you understand that I find Dad jokes just lovely; I’m an honorary Dad when it comes to jokes, really).
“Some trilobites were designed like a hydrodynamic rocket ship, and others resembled nothing more than a primordial meatloaf.”
The problem, however, is me. Apparently, as I found out, I’m not as much a member of “Paleozoically inclined people” as I had hoped. It seems that my interests lean a bit more Mezozoic, and despite loving everything about dinosaurs I tend to zone out quite a bit when trilobites take center stage. Well, you love what you love.
My attention did perk up a bit more in the end when Secher was discussing difficulties with acquiring trilobites fossils due to countries starting to treat these as “national treasures”, the paucity of sone museums collections, and the difficulty of extracting fossils. That was quite interesting and I wish he spent a bit more time on it.
And the photos are indeed gorgeous.
So if you love trilobites, you will probably love this book. If, like me, you turn out to be indifferent to them, you may find yourself a bit bored. So it’s not the book; it’s probably me.
3 stars.
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Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.
books are life 