Paleontological Expedition

little silo thingy typical of the campo of Aiquile. It is on stilts to keep the rodents out.



After a peculiar series of coincidences involiving a tennis friend of my mom, a retirement home in Asheville, Methodist missionaries, and an Italian director of Caritas, I found myself trolling the desert landscape near Aiquile looking for Trilobites with none other than LeGrand Smith, the famous amateur Trilobite paleontologist (who has several species and even a Genus named after him).







I went through my interest as an ecologist and general nature nerd, as well as a chance to explore a bit more of Bolivia, and I was not disappointed. The first day we found a few trilobites, but mostly conolarids and brachiopods. The second day was the real gem. I found several good trilobites, but this last picture was cause for a lot of excitement. It is a crinoid, and if you look closely at some of the plates, some of them are 5 sided. Now, to be honest, I have only studied things that are still living, and which have done so within the last 400 million year or so, so this critter is way beyond my expertise, but LeGrand was sure excited about it. He is a trilobite expert, not a crinoid expert, so he couldn't identify it for sure, but he said it is possibly a new species, and if not, it is one of the best specimens of this type that he is aware of. He said there will be a publication in it for sure. How odd that I might contribute to a paleontological paper before I can even get my squirrel research published!