This is what you do to find trilobites: get a sturdy bucket, a sledge hammer, a rock hammer, a big chisel that will take on stone, paper towels, gloves, safety glasses, and a thermos of water for yourself. I learned to bring a few other things for next time, such as a gel pad to make sitting on pointy slabs of shale more comfortable. If you are after brachiopods and corals, just bring a trowel and a bucket, maybe a few paper towels to wrap fragile specimens. Off you go, out into the yonder of rock piles, find a spot, and dig.
I arrived a bit late, which was okay as there were plenty of gravestone-size chunks for all; I tottered over wobbling stones to an empty bit, sat and surveyed those around me. Technique? Pick a boulder and with your rock hammer, beat the snot out of it directly in the middle of the top. Shale will crack as it is a softer stone, and sedimentary; once the crack begins a fault line, aim the chisel into it and continue beating. It may or may not open, for often a chip will skitter off, and then it's back to hammering.
Nothing but horn corals appeared for the first hour of bam bam bam, as I generated a ring of crushed stone around me; this was punctuated by the voices of finders of trilobites.
"Oh look, he's laying flat, that's a nice one, third one today."
Relentless, I chose another stone after finishing the first and imbedded on the surface was a healthy sized thorax and tail of a trilobite. So they do exist! This inspired a new dedication to bashing stone, and it was then that I started hitting gold. Not a whole one, but dang near close.
One rock split to reveal a puddle of trilobites clustered together, as if they were hiding and something killed them all at once. Might have been a storm, said a dusty neighbor, that caused the animals to try to hide together, for they gathered in pools as a possible survival strategy. Aw, I thought, poor things. then something killed them all at once, either a disease or climate change. Remember, 400 million years ago, when you were a trilobite scooting along the ocean floor, you were located in Euramerica, right spat at the equator. Devonian period, y'know.
You have to stand up once in a while to avoid the fetal rock-cracker position that will freeze you into an Incan mummy posture until someone unwinds your limbs. But for the rest of the afternoon, I smashed stone along with my 120 co-horts; we looked like prisoners working piles of rock, sounding like crazed woodpeckers. Many layers of bam.
I didn't bang my fingers once, but I managed to hit my wrist a few times; my fingers were like claws by about one o'clock and even today I can't make a closed fist with my right hand. Ow. The bucket held about ten pounds of fascination, my nose took on a Vesuvius of dust, and I won't ever wear a loose-necked shirt around flying stone fragments again. It was embarrassing, as you can't go digging down your front if people don't know you or are another gender; so I came home with added minerals. I thought that the people dressed as if they were scientists were play-acting, bundled up with lots of pockets and bandanas tied around necks. Well, they were smart and didn't develop a crust of shards, I looked like Alligator Girl with a bucket. Besides, many of them were scientists.
At the end, it felt like a lawnmower had run over me, everything hurt, so there was aspirin before bed and I am just now starting to feel functional. But oh. One man runs a large telescope down in Mansfield, Ohio that can find distant galaxies, another is an expert on ancient oceans; these accomplished women and men hammered away at slabs of shale, and reduced the field to gray rubble.
The earth shrugged. There have been five great mass extinctions, and some researchers claim that we are in the middle of a very fast sixth. Over all time, 95% of life has become extinct; during the Devonian age, 70% of all invertebrates disappeared. That included brachiopods, trilobites, corals, and other early marine life; the terrestials were barely touched. It is hypothesized that an increase in land plants used up the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, cooling the earth over a twenty million year period.
Million, that is a vast number and here I am, holding a life from 400 million years ago. I have dragged my treasures upstairs, rinsed them off and will neaten them up a bit with a dental pick. A solution of white glue and water will protect them, now that they are no longer blanketed by pounds of shale.
Mars is close, look up for an unblinking orange ball in the night sky; look up and know that some of those stars are actually whirling galaxies, with systems and life and rising suns. Are skies blue everywhere? Is chlorophyll green? What sort of stores are there on other planets? Sort of neat to think that maybe peanuts grow elsewhere, that maybe earth isn't their only gig. Do alien children like Snickers bars? The nearest earth-like planet is 10.5 light years away, circling a star in Alpha Centauri; what if they had a Snickers factory? What if they weren't so different from you and I in mind or taste? Like the galaxy-scientist said, it would fill your heart.
Sleep this cool spring night, the dark soothes and equalizes while the stars shine down on the fossil pit, the future illuminating the past, starlight twinkling over trilobites. Live with honor, it's the best we can do. Good night.
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