Five Places to See Trilobites in the United States | Travel

Andy Secher remembers the first time he came face to face with a fossil. He was seven years old and riding the school bus when the bus driver showed him and the other students a specimen that he had unearthed during a weekend dig in Upstate New York.

“I was fascinated,” Secher says. “And after that, I was kind of hooked.”

Hooked is an understatement. Fast forward to adulthood and Secher has amassed a personal collection of some 5,000 fossils, which he houses inside his 1,650-square-foot Manhattan apartment. His passion for fossils, and specifically trilobites—extinct hard-shelled marine invertebrates that existed during the Paleozoic Era, a time period that stretched around 289 million years—led him to a career as a field associate in paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). There, for the past 15 years, he has been co-editor of the museum’s popular Trilobite website.

“I often joke that I have the largest trilobite collection on the Upper West Side,” Secher says. (The fact that the world-renowned museum, with its thousands of specimens, is less than a half-mile walk from his apartment makes the quip all the more humorous.)

So, what is it about trilobites that make them different from other fossils? For Secher, the answer is simple. In his book he writes, “Even at a very early stage in the history of life on our planet, the trilobite design had already proven to possess a certain degree of evolutionary perfection.” Add to that the fact that there’s such a variety of specimens out there, resembling everything from what he describes as a “hydrodynamic spaceship” to “nothing more than a primordial meatloaf,” and it’s easy to see why collectors like Secher are thirsty for trilobites.

More recently, Secher added another bullet point to his résumé with the release of his book Travels with Trilobites: Adventures in the Paleozoic, which takes readers on a journey to some of the best places around the world to see these ancient arthropods, from museum collections to quarry fossil beds.

Travels with Trilobites: Adventures in the Paleozoic

Andy Secher invites readers to come along in search of…