1.6" Spiny Koneprusia Trilobite With Austrops - Ofaten, Morocco

Spiny Koneprusia Trilobite With Austrops - Ofaten, Morocco #268857

This is an excellent, 1.6" long specimen of a super spiny trilobite (Koneprusia) collected near Ofaten, Morocco. It is a very time consuming process to free all of these long spines from their limestone tomb requiring a tremendous amount of skill. A trilobite like this would have probably taken in the area of 40 hours of work under high magnification using air abrasives. It is associated with an Austerops trilobite on the limestone. Total restoration is about 2%

Trilobites were a very diverse group of extinct marine arthropods. They first appeared in the fossil record in the Early Cambrian (521 million years ago) and went extinct during the Permian mass extinction (250 million years ago). They were one of the most successful of the early animals on our planet: over 25,000 species have been described, filling nearly every evolutionary niche. Due in large part to their hard exoskeletons (shells), they left an excellent fossil record.

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