Earth’s Heritage – Trilobite Fossil by Prof. Emeritus Dato’ Dr. Ibrahim Komoo, Advisor Langkawi UNESCO Global Geopark

These marine animals were the earliest known arthropods (invertebrate animals with hard external skeletons and jointed limbs), and so were distant relatives of modern incrustations (e.g crabs). The trilobite body was divided into a head, consisting of at least five fused segments, a thorax which was also segmented and enabled the animal to roll itself into a ball, and a tail.
The length of the body was also divided into three by a pair of furrows, and it is this characteristic that accounts for their name (3 lobes).
Trilobites had gills on their many pairs of limbs and had compound eyes like insects. Trilobites were once very plentiful. Several thousands of different species are known, but all are now extinct.
They first arose in the Cambrian Period (550 to 490 Myo) and dies at the end of the Permian Period (about 251 million years ago). Trilobites are useful in determining the age of rocks, particularly those deposited during the Cambrian and Ordovician periods.

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