The Verge Review of Animals: Trilobites

When I was a teenager, I spent my summers up on North Hero, one of the Vermont islands in Lake Champlain. The island chain sits on top of the Trenton Group, a formation of rocks that date back to the Ordovician period. Find the right band of sedimentary rock, and you’ll likely find something peeking out at you when you start turning over pebbles: trilobites. I love finding these little treasures hidden amidst the crumbling outcrops here.

They were survivors, up until they went extinct

Trilobites have an epic history behind them, from the time they first appear in the fossil 521 million years ago. They had a good run of the Earth for a while there too: over 270 million years, which is longer than the time humans and dinosaurs have...