Robert M. Owens
National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

For TP-2, Carsten Brauckmann submitted an unofficial trilobite stamp from Germany. However, over the past 33 years, ten official stamps featuring trilobites have been issued by nine postal authorities. Although meagre in number in comparison with dinosaurs (176 stamps from 44 countries by 1991), they are at least almost all from areas in which the fossils have actually been found (definitely not the case for many of the dinosaur stamps). Five are from the Cambrian, with one each from the Ordovician to Permian, with the possible exception of the Carboniferous.

The very first trilobite stamp was issued by China in 1958 (in the same set as the first dinosaur stamp). It illustrates a cranidium and pygidium of the late Cambrian dameselloidean Kaolishania from northern China, with two reconstructed specimens swimming in the background. The other four Cambrian trilobite stamps were not issued until 1989-90. The British Antarctic Territory issued a long series of attractive palaeontological stamps which included the Middle Cambrian ptychopariid Lyriaspis and the ptychagnostid Triplagnostus. In 1990 Canada embarked on its own palaeontological series, the first four stamps of which included Paradoxides davidis from eastern Newfoundland, renowned as a giant among trilobites, first discovered by John Salter in South Wales in 1862. All four of the foregoing are reasonably accurate. This cannot be said of the Cambrian trilobites in a ‘Burgessian’ diorama on the 50s stamp in the ‘Evolution of the Earth’ series of Niuafo’ou (or ‘Tin Can Island’) -- one of the Tonga group of islands in the South Pacific, and remote indeed from the nearest Cambrian outcrop! I suppose that they were meant to represent Olenoides swimming though the waters with other Burgess arthropods, including Marrella.

Odontopleurids are illustrated for both the Ordovician and Silurian. Selenopeltis buchi buchi from the Ordovician of the Barrandian area, Czechoslovakia is featured on one of the four stamps issued on the occasion of the ill-fated International Geological Congress in Prague in 1968. Odontopleura ovata was one of a series of specimens chosen by East Germany in 1973 to illustrate fossils in the Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin. This is a photographic illustration of the holotype from a Silurian erratic from Lower Silesia, Poland.

Contrasting strongly is the rather stylized enrolled Devonian Phacops (s.l. - very!) on the 1972 stamp of Mauritania (not illustrated). There is no bona fide Carboniferous trilobite on a stamp, but a very diagrammatic trilobite is included, along with a fossil plant, on the Fossil Fuels stamp issued by the USA in 1982 for the Knoxville World’s Fair. On the assumption that a coal seam is represented, the fossils might be of Carboniferous age -- and it could also be interpreted as a non-marine trilobite! The fossils on the stamps of Tunisia, issued in 1982 include a Permian trilobite belonging to Pseudophillipsia, which is widespread in the Tethyan region. Described by the Termiers in 1974, P. azzouzi at 65 mm long is large for a Permian trilobite. The specimen is complete -- the pygidium is reasonably accurately drawn, but something decidedly odd has happened to the cephalon!

These ten are the total trilobite stamps known to me, but there may be others. In any case, if you have an interest in both trilobites and philately, assembling this attractive thematic set is no hard task. Hopefully, they will be joined by others in the years to come.

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Lament for the passing of the trilobites

Nigel Hughes, now University of California, Riverside

Oh, look, what can this be,
Swimming all over the Cambrian sea?
Is it Spriggina? No, it cannot be.
Some new and strange innovation maybe.

Come, hear the tale of the Trilobite days,
Niches exploited in so many ways!
Where did they come from and where did they go?
I’ve just spent three years and I still do not know.

Paradoxides is not what it sems,
And its more or less segments, who knows what that means?
Trilobite workers in such consternation,
Intraspecific phenotypic variation.

Phacopids with the schiz’croal eyes
And they’ve more or less lenses, was that really wise?
Species selection it made the decision,
Advantages reap’d from peripheral vision.

So why did these marvellous creatures decline?
Was it meteorite impact or just too much wine?
Was it drying of oceans on Pangea’s shores?
Was it nat’ral progression of one of Cope’s laws?

Alas! it seems there’s no end to debate
On the ultimate cause that determined their fate,
For trilobite workers’d be out of a job,
So, if you discover - Just keep shut your gob!

Come, hear the tale of the Trilobite days,
Niches exploited in so many ways!
Where did they come from and where did they go?
I’ll spend all my life and I’ll still never know!