Trilobite Note

Almost six years ago, I wrote a piece about an early trilobite discovery and evidence of prehistoric and pre-literate knowledge of the nature of trilobites. It was pretty good and was included in The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs, 2010. Flash forward to this weekend. Catching up on my mail, I found a letter from a museum conservator in Utah asking about the source of one of the illustrations in the post and asking about a higher resolution version of it.

I wasn't very good about linking to the sources of illustrations back then. I have since learned better. Worse, the files and drafts of old blog posts are all on the hard drive of a computer that died about three years ago. I figured it wouldn't be that hard to redo the search I made that found the illustration in the first place. I was wrong. I tried Googling the location where the trilobite in question was found. I flipped to the image page and found several copies of the illustration. All of them linked back to me. This is flattering, but not helpful.

The illustration.

After noodling around for a while, I figured out how to find it. I found a scientific paper that mentioned the discovery (as a bonus, it had a photograph of the fossil). From that I found the name of the discoverer and the French journal that published his original report. I did a quick search to see if I could find it online. I couldn't, so I went Gallica, the site that has scanned copies of books and journals in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. There I had no problem finding the illustration, not in the original journal, but in one a few years later. My Google fu is still amazing. While looking for the illustration, I found out a good deal more about that fossil and decided to share it.

Adrien-Jacques-François Ficatier was an army doctor stationed in Paris during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. He was also an amateur archaeologist. During the 1880s, he spent several summers poking around caves in the Yonne region southeast of Paris looking for artifacts. In 1886 he explored one of a series of caves just upstream from Arcy-sur-Cure. This cave is almost 60 meters long with a thick layer of earth, rich in artifacts, covering the bottom. The lowest layers have been dated to 35,000 years ago--well before the last glacial maximum. Ficatier excavated the two upper layers in the cave which date 14-15,000 years ago. There he found bones of horse and reindeer along with hundreds of pieces of worked flint, four needles, three spears, and several pieces that had been drilled to be worn as pendants. These were a wolf's tooth, four scallops, other marine shells, a beetle carved from pine, and a trilobite.

The trilobite is small--43 mm long and 23 mm at its widest point--and well worn as if it has been handled a lot. There are tiny holes on either side that would have been used to hang it. In 1897, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, the Society of Historic and Natural Sciences of the Yonne organized a series of excursions to the caves of Arcy-sur-Cure and St. Moré to compliment the usual dinners and lectures. Henri Douvillé, an  influential professor of paleontology at the École des Mines, told the Society that the trilobite belonged to the species Dalmanites hawlei found in Bohemia (the Czech Republic). More recent paleontologists have questioned that identification, but all agree that it was not a local fossil.

The trilobite.

The stratum where the trilobite was found has been dated to about 14,000 years ago. This is after the glacial maximum had passed, but during a sudden cold snap called the Older Dryas. The human culture of the time, called Magdalenian, was originally identified as one of great reindeer hunters. They had an improved set of hunting tools and were using dogs. Of course, they didn't just hunt reindeer. It was at about this time that mammoths died out in Europe.

There was more to their culture than just hunting. They manufactured items for personal adornment. The little trilobite meant something to them. It had enough value that it was a worthy object for long distance trade. What it meant is hard to say. One of the other items Dr. Ficatier excavated that summer might offer some context. The only manufactured amulet is a wood-borer beetle carved from lignite. Like the trilobite, it has holes drilled on the sides, rather than the top, for hanging. In many parts of the world where trilobites were traditionally called some variation of "stone insects". Was the trilobite significant because it resembled a beetle? Were these people the clan of the cave beetle? No one knows.

The best image.

After the summer was over and he returned to his job, Ficatier wrote up his field notes and they were published in a regional journal the Almanach historique de l'Yonne de 1887. It is here that the illustration first appeared. Over the next ten years, it was published in at least three journals that I know of. I've taken my image from the Bulletin de la Société d'anthropologie et de biologie de Lyon. The fossil itself, along with the beetle were placed in a museum in Joigny. Later that collection was moved to the Musée de l'Avallonnais. The museum's displays are mostly of local artists. There is an archaeology room, but I have been unable to determine if the trilobite, or the beetle, is part of the permanent display.

One final note. While looking for some biographical information on Ficatier I found out that a Playboy playmate from the 80's named Carol Ficatier is from Auxerre near Arcy-sur-Cure. I don't know how common the name Ficatier is in that part of France but, if it's not common, there's a possibility that they're related. Fame takes many forms.


The uncredited image.
Me. "The First Trilobite," Mammoth Tales. 10/14/2015 (reprint).

The photograph.
Schmider, Béatrice, et al. "L'abri du Lagopède (fouilles Leroi-Gourhan) et le Magdalénien des grottes de la Cure (Yonne)," Gallia préhistoire. Vol. 37,  No. 1 (1995)  pp. 55-114.

The credited image.
"Communication de M. PHILIPPE SALMON, L'Age de la pierre," Bulletin de la Société d'anthropologie et de biologie de Lyon, Vol. 6 (1891) pp. 13-18.

The First Trilobite

NOTE: In honor of National Fossil Day here's a post I wrote five years ago about a famous trilobite.

In their early days, scientific journals were much more generous than they are today about publishing letters from experimenters and collectors in all walks of life. The hard wall between scientists and amateurs had not yet been built and all literate people were, in theory, entitled to participate in the discussion. One such person was Rev. Edward Lhwyd (or Lhuyd or Lhwid or Lloyd), the illegitimate son of a member of the minor gentry who rose from genteel poverty to become keeper of collections at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (an unpaid position, but important in the community of science). The 1698 volume of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the oldest scientific journal in the English language, contains "Part of a Letter from Mr. Edw. Lhwyd to Dr. Martin Lister, Fell. of the Coll. of Phys. and R. S. Concerning Several Regularly Figured Stones Lately Found by Him." The two-page letter is accompanied by a page of etchings of the figured stones or, as we would call them, fossils.

Lhwyd collected his fossils during a trip to Southwestern Wales. Number fifteen, in his etchings, he found near Llandeilo, probably on the grounds of Lord Dynefor's castle. He wrote of it: "The 15th whereof we found great Plenty, must doubtless be referred to the Sceleton of some flat Fish..." A century and a half after he wrote that, Sir Roderick Murchison would place the Llandeilo rocks in the middle strata of his Ordovician Period. A century after Murchison, scientists would date that strata between 461-63 million years old. That is less than ten million years after the first plants took root on dry land and a hundred million years before cockroaches crawled out of the sea looking for a snack.


Lhwyd's "flatfish." Today we call it Ogygiocarella debuchii (Brongniart).
Lhwyd's identification of number fifteen as a flatfish didn't last very long. Today anyone with even a casual knowledge of fossils will recognise it as a trilobite, something more like a shrimp than a halibut. Lhwyd didn't have our advantage of hundreds of years of fossil studies producing thousands of lavishly illustrated and easily accessible books. It would be almost a century before the word "trilobite" would be coined and into Murchison's time before the scientific world would realize that trilobites were not related to halibut or shrimp (or oysters, another contender) but, rather, something entirely their own. Lhwyd was plunging ahead in the dark trying to make sense of an unfamiliar and mysterious corner of nature.

Lhwyd deserves great credit for deciding his little flatfish was worthy of notice and for sending his drawings to the Royal Society, although, sometimes, he gets a little too much credit. His illustration is the first published scientific illustration of a trilobite that we know of, but he did not "discover" trilobites, as some books will tell you. We should always regard any claim that someone discovered a fossil species with suspicion. Trilobites are extremely common fossils and can be found laying on the surface in many parts of the world. Our ancestors were both aware of fossils and, in many cases, aware that they were the petrified remains of once living things. Usually, what an author means when they declare that this person or that person discovered a fossil is that they were the first to describe the fossil in scientific literature. Lhwyd's illustration certainly counts as a description in that sense, but it is not the first description we know of.

No one can say when people first noticed that fossils were different than other rocks except to say that it was very long ago. The first step in making stone tools is to examine stones very carefully, so it is possible that our ancestors were aware of organic patterns in rocks over a million years ago. For trilobites, specifically, the earliest evidence of humans treating a fossil as something specially comes from a cave near Yonne, France. In the 1880s, when archaeologists were combing the caves of central France looking for artifacts, bones, and paintings, they discovered a much handled trilobite fossil that had been drilled as if to be worn as a pendant. The cave where it was found is now known as Grotte du Trilobite and is also home to paintings of mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses. Because the pendant was handled so much, the exact species of trilobite cannot be determined, however, geologists can say that it was not originally from Yonne. The original owners of the fossil thought enough of it that they carried or traded it from the other side of France. The occupation strata in which the trilobite was found has been dated as fifteen thousand years old.


The oldest known human trilobite artifact from the Grotte du Trilobite.
In the New World, American fossil hunters found plentiful deposits of trilobites in western Utah in the 1860s, but the local Ute Indians had known about them for untold years. In 1931, Frank Beckwith uncovered evidence of the Ute use of trilobites. Travelling through the badlands, he photographed two petroglyphs that most likely represent trilobites. On the same trip he examined a burial, of unknown age, with a drilled trilobite fossil laying in the chest cavity of the interred. He asked Joe Pichyavit, a Ute friend, what the elders said about such fossils. Pickyavit replied that trilobite necklaces were worn as protection against disease and bullets. The local Ute name for trilobite fossils translated roughly as "little water bug in stone," indicating that they recognised the organic nature of fossils. Pickyavit then made a necklace for Beckwith in the old style. Since then, trilobite amulets have been found all over the Great Basin, as well as in British Columbia and Australia.


Probable trilobite petroglyph. Beckwith's label reads "A shield (?) shaped like a trilobite."

Joe Pickyavit's trilobite protective necklace made of fossils, clay beads, and horsehair tassels.
Written descriptions of trilobites before Lhywd date possibly from the third century BC and definitely from the fourth century AD. Most ancient literatures include a genre called lapidaries, catalogs of precious stones and minerals along with their practical uses in medicine and magic (often the same thing). Most of the lapidaries included discussions of fossils and one, On Petrifactions by Theophrastus, was entirely about fossils. Sadly, the book has not survived and we know only short quotes from it in the works of later authors. The Spanish geologists Eladio Liñán and Rodolfo Gozalo argue that some of the fossils described in Greek and Latin lapidaries as scorpion stone, beetle stone, and ant stone refer to trilobite fossils. Less ambiguous references to trilobite fossils can be found in Chinese sources. Fossils from the Kushan formation of northeastern China were prized as inkstones and decorative pieces. A dictionary commentary written around 300AD by Guo Pu, refers to these fossils as bat stones because the spines on the pygidium (rear section) resemble the bones of a bat wing. The Khai-Pao Pharmacopoeia, written in 970 refers to the fossils as stone silkworms. Just nine years before Lhywd sent his letter to the Royal Society, Wang Shizhen wrote about the Kushan formation fossils a narrative of his travels in North China.

None of this should diminish Lhywd's place in the history of paleontology. Lhywd's observations were made within the framework of the emerging Western concept of science. The fossils were not interesting oddities that he found in the course of doing something else; they were the object of his outing. Lhywd took an artist along with him on his trip to Wales for the express purpose of preparing scientific illustrations. He communicated his observations to other scientifically interested people with the understanding that they would get further distribution. Finally, Lhywd gathered his fossils and took them back with him to the Ashmolean Museum where others would be able to study them.

As for number fifteen, it's not clear whether the fossil trilobite itself has survived. Modern curators at the Ashmolean have tried to identify Lhwyd's fossils in their collections. They have one old trilobite that approximately matches number fifteen, but they are unable to make a positive identification. The Romantic in me hopes its the one.


Number fifteen?