The oldest thing I own

Over the winter holiday I took a trip with family to Atlanta and the surrounding area. One of the places we went to was the Fernbank Natural History Museum (despite its name it also has exhibits detailing Georgia's human history). Has a cool Imax theater as well. Anyways I picked up this trilobite fossil (my first) from the museum's gift shop. I like fossils (but I don't really collect them like coins), this one was cool-looking and was affordable, so I thought "why not?".

I was expecting it to be only around the age of the oldest of my few other fossils (a piece of coral ~250 million years old) which would still have been neat but imagine my surprise when I found out that it was much older than that. The tag only said Morocco trilobite so I did some digging (ba-dum-chishhhh! ) and found out that is (hopefully I'm correct on this) a trilobite from the genus Flexicalymene, which existed from the Ordovician (485.4 MYA) to the Silurian (419.2 MYA) Period. From my limited understanding trilobites and old fossils like it are a dime a dozen but it really is cool to have something from such a long time ago like 400-something million years. Also fascinating was the fact that trilobites are still kind of with us, in the form of their descendants the horseshoe crabs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicalymene







Trilobites going nuts at a wild party (pic from finefossils.com):



Map of my trilobite's world (scotese.com):



Please feel free to post any fossils you own!

 

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Oh man, I'm a huge trilobite fanatic. I have a few of them in a box at a storage facility near my house. I had to store them in a box and put them in the storage facility because my son would keep finding them and playing with them, no matter which drawer I put them in, so I boxed them up and stored them at the location I store my old legal files. I'll see if I can make some time next month or two and go to the storage facility to snap a few pictures.

Congrats dude. Trilobites are awesome!

 

The Gordian III of the fossil world!

I own a few, but not that large, nice.

I tend to like insects in amber more.

 

They are cool, aren't they ???

I purchased two decades ago, gave one as a gift and kept the other---but yours appears a much better example...

Impossible to imagine that they are more than 400 million years old!!

Recently, while 'vacationing' in Florida at a nieces wedding, I visited an aquarium and one of the 'curators' mentioned the distant genetic relationship of trilobites and their look-a-like cousins the horseshoe crab---so I guess it's true.

 

Thanks for the comments! I almost forgot the dimensions: my trilobite weighs in at 93.05 grams and is 3 inches long and a little over 1 3/4 inches at its widest.

 

Well, if I have either of you three for Secret Santa this year perhaps I'll send you a nice detailed trilobite instead of a coin...one that is preserved enough to show the multi-lense (insect-like) eyes that many trilobite species had.

 

My birthday is literally coming up real soon so you should send me one before you forgot

 

Very cool , and an interesting nice write up too .

 

I own a bunch of billion year old rocks in my backyard Some prehistoric dirt too.

Cool fossil, I have some snail looking fossils.

 

Awesome OP-addition, Jango ... congrats, coin-brother!!

Oh, coincidence => I just made a pasta with Morocco trilobite sauce



... obviously, just jokes ...

I think that your new addition is top-drawer!! (rumour has it => the Ostrogoths were terrified of the trilobites)

cheers, my friend

 

BTW: The extinction of the trilobites marked the 'Great Dying'---the largest mass extinction in history where as much as 98-99% of all species died off, occurring just at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago and greatly eclipses the dying off of the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago.

An excellent book on the subject is "When Life Nearly Died" by Michael J Benton

 

Curious, Jango? => I quickly went back and tried to find a measurement, but I couldn't find it ...

Ummm, what are the dimensions of your cool fossils?

... you rock

 

Gots lots up on Long Island Sound. Danged things are plentiful as the devil.......

 

As cool as old coins or old fossils are, technically you may own older things without realizing it. Well, first of all, the atoms that make up your body, and the matter in everything in your house is billions of years old material fused in the core of stars, so technically everything is very old...even something brand new. The gold and silver in your ancient coins could have been fused 5 or 6 billion years ago in the core of the stars that created the nebula that gave birth to our sun.

If that itself doesn't impress you, look at a rock in your backyard. Depending where you live in the world, some of the rocks and pebbles in your backyard could have come from a Precambrian or Cambrian rock formation that formed 600 million years ago or more.

Science is fascinating. It makes you look at common things we would take for granted in a very different perspective.

 

That's why I became a lawyer

 

Or if any of those rocks are meteorites, several billion years old .

At least a handful of us here on CoinTalk have small collections of meteorites.


Witnessed fall meteorite, February 15, 2013. Chelyabinsk, Russia. LL5 chondrite, 48.4 gm. Whole specimen with fusion crust. Estimated age, per NASA: 4+ billion years

 

Well, there are worse things than being a lawyer...I think

Oh well, at least I'm not a mining engineer in Northern Manitoba

@stevex6

 

good luck collecting animal coins

... there are plenty to go around ...

 

You're a lawyer? That is completely new information

 

Wow. I don't think I'll mention that I was in the military any more!