ZPXFW Blog

I have a trilobite, and now scientists tell me they know how it died. I remember finding my trilo, as I hunkered down one day between two enormous hunks of granite. Adult sense tells me rain had worked into a crack on an even larger boulder. Centuries of water nudged and pried, until the molecules surrendered, and split into two rocks that waited just for me, a smallish 1950’s girl-child on the edge of Canada’s Laurentian Shield.

I’ve come close to yielding it several times - tempted to donate it to my high school’s science program, for example, caught up in the momentary nobility fossil philanthropy. I almost sold it once, motivated by greed, perhaps, or poverty, I don’t remember which. But I’ve still got it. It’s still mine after 50 years, and now scientists tell me they know how it died. My trilobite. Trilo.

250 million years ago, they say, or at least they deduce from a crater in the Antarctic that somehow they manage to measure without every leaving their labs in the USA. (I knew I should have paid more attention in Trigonometry.) A meteor 300 miles wide, they say. Killed nine out of every ten animals in every species. Including Trilobites. Probably - but not necessarily - mine.

“All the environmental changes would have created a highly caustic environment,” reports a professor of geology, no doubt proud to be quoted in a major news medium. (Publish or perish. Do sound bites count?)

What was it like, Trilo, to find yourself in an immediate and immensely caustic environment? Were you part of the dead mainstream, or were you one of the few that struggled for life? Was it worth it, being without others of your kind? What about food? Were you eaten? How long did you survive?

It was easier, Trilo, when there were no questions. When you were just a rock slab, instead of fossilized life. When you were part of the great eat-and-be-eaten world that didn’t have a name.

[Footnote - Professor Ralph von Frese, from Ohio State University. Article is “Huge meteor strike that ‘gave birth to the dinosaur’ by Lewis Smith, from www.timesonline.co.uk, June 3, 2006.]

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