TRILOBITE PAPERS 9

COMPLETE TRILOBITE PAPERS 9
Now Available on CD-ROM

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Editorial: Treatise Right!

Rolf Ludvigsen, DIRT

Its title is boring. Its appearance, dour and conservative blue. A casual browser would not be enticed to take it off the library shelf. And yet, it is, without a doubt, the most influential publication venture in paleontology ever undertaken. I am, of course, referring to the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. This series has covered all of the invertebrate groups and the entire alphabet from A (Introduction) and B (Porifera) to V (Graptolithina) and W (Miscellanea) since Part G (Bryozoa) was published in 1953, with many additional numbered volumes and addenda. Collectively, it is an impressive compendium!. Side by side, the Treatise volumes published to date must take up a metre and a half of shelf space (my partial set occupies 80 cm).

A Treatise volume is used not only by specialists, but also by other paleontologists, by biologists, by earth scientists and, significantly, by students. The Treatise is accepted by each of these groups to be the most authoritative statement on the characteristics of a fossil group, its nature, its distribution, and its classification. All of the volumes are now being revised.

My generation (and the next) has grown up with the 1959 Trilobite Treatise. Although we often complained about the quality of some of the diagnoses and about the sometimes non-sensical classification ("What the hell is the superfamily Raymondinacea, and what is Cedaria doing there?"), we returned to this volume again and again, to check the generic identification of a trilobite and to use its classification as a springboard for new and improved arrangements. Indeed, it is simply impossible for a trilobite worker to function without "Part O, Arthropoda 1".

Work on the Trilobite Treatise started about 50 years ago in the late 1940s when taxonomic groups were assigned to the original authors. The influence of their contributions cannot be overemphasized -- these 18 paleontologists effectively defined trilobite paleontology for the next forty years.

By the early 1980s it had become apparent that the pace of genus making was such that a revision to the Trilobite Treatise was necessary. Moreover, knowledge about appendages, vision, ontogeny and systematics of trilobites had accumulated to the extent that the introductory sections of the Treatise needed to be rewritten. Harry Whittington agreed to assume responsiblity for the first of the three volumes. That volume, primarily introductory, has now been published and the entire trilobite community should celebrate!

That celebration should not, however, divert attention away from the next crucial task -- the completion of the systematic sections for volumes 2 and 3 which includes virtually all of the messy groups. Richard Fortey, who has accepted responsiblity for the unenviable task of riding herd on twenty British, Australian and Canadian paleontologists who have each agreed to contribute, plus one or two each from Sweden, China, France, Germany and United States (by the way, what has happened to trilobite systematics in the States?). Richard has set an ambitious goal -- all the manuscripts for Volume 2 in by the time of the Third International Trilobite Conference in Oxford in 2001, and those for Volume 3 soon after. If that goal is to be met, all contributors should begin assembling their taxonomic data and photos now.

A contribution to the revised Treatise is as fundamental a contribution each of us can make to our profession. You have the guarantee that all trilobite workers, other paleontologists and paleontology students will consult your work for the next 40 or 50 years. What else could you ask for?

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The Second International Trilobite Conference:
A Personal View

Brian Pratt
University of Saskatchewan

1981 found me in Calgary working for an oil company as a bored and restless exploration geologist. Later that year, after the Second International Cambrian Symposium in Colorado, I confirmed my plans to accept the ultimate challenge and study trilobites for a doctoral thesis under our esteemed editor, Rolf Ludvigsen, then at University of Toronto. I knew there was a long road ahead coming to grips with over a century of taxonomic and paleobiological literature dealing with our favourite beasts. So, the first thing I did was order a personal copy of Fossils & Strata Number 4; that is, "Evolution and Morphology of the Trilobita, Trilobitoidea and Merostomata", published in 1975. I got the very last copy that Universitetsforlaget had. It cost me $100, the most expensive book I had ever bought. This weighty tome arrived in the mail and I took it down to the only bookbindery in Cowtown, and had it covered in nice green boards with gold lettering -- the original binding was pretty flimsy. I spent many a pleasant evening reading those papers and admiring the wisdom and beautiful photographs they contained. I was overwhelmingly inspired and eager to abandon the pay cheques and head to Toronto. The authors were the trilobite champions of the time, and I was proud to be able to claim to already know personally one of them, Richard Fortey. (In fact, Richard had advised me several years earlier that trilobites would not be a good subject for a doctorate, being overpopulated with workers already!) Later I would come to shake the hands of most of the other authors, thereby officially joining the trilobite fraternity. I wanted to write papers like these masterpieces of scholarship -- the result of what was in essence the first international trilobite symposium, convened in Oslo by Dave Bruton in 1973.

After two decades, another international trilobite gathering was clearly long overdue. New trilobite paleontologists had come to the fore, some of the old guard had left the stage. What was needed was someone to give the idea some momentum, and with Rolf's encouragement, the next symposium was slated to be held in Uzbekistan in 1993. Political problems in the old USSR caused these plans to fall through, but Steve Westrop picked up the baton, and the symposium was slated for 1997 at the small Canadian campus of Brock University in St. Catherines, south of Toronto. And a fairly small band of trilobite some seventy enthusiasts duly congregated there in late August, a sprinkling of veterans among the younger generation. The academics hailed from Australia, China, Scandinavia, Korea, India, Italy, Germany, France, UK, Spain, Russia, Estonia, and North America. This time we had the welcome presence of some of the amateur paleontological fraternity. Indeed, displays of their prepared trilobites reminded those of us in the cloister of the extraordinary appeal our favourite beasts have and the abilities of our friends in the meticulous preparations they carry out.

The four-day conference started off with a day devoted to trilobite phylogeny and morphometrics, while the subsequent three days comprised a wide variety of papers on all other aspects of trilobites. The first paper was an overview of phylogenetics by a University of Toronto evolutionary biologist, who, while not a trilobite person (and who vanished for the remainder of the meeting), set the stage for the next half dozen talks that explored phylogenies based on cladistical techniques. Greg Edgecombe diverged with an analysis of biogeographical patterns and pitfalls using cladistics. The rest of the afternoon was devoted to morphometric studies-so much easier with advances in digitizing and some of these kinds of talks spilled over into later days. Finally a pep talk by Roger Kaesler on fossil databases, obviously necessary for the future to satisfy not only funding agencies to show we are ready for the 21st century, but also to make hitherto practically inaccessible information available to the non-trilobite specialist. Some of us (not me though) have created our own computerized databases and now is the time for some collaboration. Later, the revised "Treatise" was the subject of discussion as taxonomic groups were parcelled out and authors exhorted by editor Richard Fortey.

The papers of the next three days have almost become a blur of names, numbers, taxa and time. The reader of this review must excuse me for not being too specific in my mention of individual papers, and the program reproduced in this issue of "The Trilobite Papers" is the place to go for titles and authors. We heard about trilobites from all parts of the Paleozoic: Cambrian from Korea, Canada, USA, Spain, Siberia, China, France.

Ordovician from Scandinavia, Newfoundland, Sardinia, Canada. Younger trilobites from Morocco, USA and Bohemia. Eaten and bitten trilobites. Trilobite feeding. Moulting trilobites and enrolling trilobites. Baby trilobites. Camouflaged trilobites. Trilobite microstructure. Trilobite communities and biostratigraphy. Trilobites with vision and trilobites without.

Speaking of vision, venerable Ron Tripp gave a delightful historical talk, modestly as third author, on silicified trilobites from the Middle Ordovician of Virginia. Ron was the only representative at the symposium from the original cast of authors of the 1959 "Treatise", and his participation was greatly appreciated. Tom Whiteley reminded us again of what a superb paleontologist Charles D. Walcott was even as a young amateur when he carried out remarkably sophisticated work on Ceraurus appendages more than 120 years ago.

The relaxed and personal nature of the group was wonderful, and new friendships were established and old ones renewed. We all regretted absent trilobite colleagues. The talks were varied in delivery and accent. Off the tongue rolled different versions of such delights as Hundwarella, Trimerocephalus, Hystricurus, Opoa, Benthamaspis, Exochops, Erratencrinurus, Hemiarges, Cyrtosymbole, Bumastus, and one of my all-time favourites, Jujuyaspis, named after an Argentine city in the remote northwest. However, I think one can admonish some of the native English speakers for some insensitivity to language difficulties in their race through their talks.

The masses of notes I scribbled against the abstracts during the talks tells me I learned a lot of new things, and I know I came away totally inspired: so much to do, so much to discover! From my perspective, though, I found that the oral format was not the best way to present some of the more complex phylogenies and morphometrics that were actually shown. It is hard to retain the salient ideas put forth. But just as biostratigraphers

ought to resist the temptation to present the mandatory unreadable range chart, number crunchers should simplify their synapomorphy-laced cladograms and landmark-studded reconstructions. "Just the facts, ma'am" (in the words of one FBI agent) would get the main message across. That way I might be more convinced that two-dimensional landmark morphometrics is really going to tell me something new, for example. I enjoyed the descriptive talks that, showed actual specimens, even if they were unfamiliar taxa and about unfamiliar intervals. Silicified material, especially that shown by Brian Chatterton and his colleagues, was spectacular and much has been learned through it. The implications of Cambro-Ordovician trilobites for biostratigraphic issues were the subject of parts of two afternoons. Pete Palmer told us North Americans to formalize stages for Laurentia -- I think Rolf and Steve were pleased to see their iconoclastic 1985 proposal of new Upper Cambrian stages finally being 'officially' recognized. Let us hope that the archaic Dresbachian, Franconian and Trempealeauan slip into relative obscurity and let’s go forward with a nomenclature that is better defined and correlatable internationally. That we can do this was clear, for example, from Shanchi Peng's detailed Middle-Upper Cambrian biostratigraphy. Doug Boyce argued in favour of retaining the Canadian stage for eastern North America, rather than adopting the Ibexian. On the opposite end of the spectrum of scale, Arne Nielsen showed what can be done about ecophenotypes with ultra-fine sampling. The presentations by Raimund Feist and Catherine Cronier on Devonian faunas left me wondering again why trilobites seemed to have first loved western Canada during the Middle Devonian, then hated it in the Late Devonian, but then warmed to it again in the Carboniferous. Gerald Kloc's interpretation of epibionts on Dicranurus was fascinating and convincing, and reminded me of how little I know of the habits of living animals and how much they can be used as analogues. On the other hand, some interpretations, such as hypostome function which Richard dealt with, will have to remain more or less purely speculative and therefore a real challenge. Another challenge, as Don Mikulic pointed out, is how much we lose even in North America when quarries are filled in and exposures destroyed. Talks on trilobite paleobiology and paleoecology appealed to all participants. Derek Siveter's illustration of homalonotid ultrastructure impressed me as a carbonate petrologist: it is more complex than what we see in the Cambrian and we really have a lot to learn about exoskeletal microstructure and its diagenesis. Trilobite ontogeny was a recurring theme in the conference, with many talks documenting them in detail and using them for establishing phylogenetic stories. Documenting ontogenies for as many lineages as possible is clearly one of the most important things ahead of us in trilobite taxonomy. We still have a lot to do to shake down higher level classification.

Trilobites live on! I hope our colleagues and our profession do too, so we can reconvene in the near future and do it again. And we should make sure that trilobites take their rightful place in more general conferences.

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Splendor ‘neath the Trilobite


From "Planet Ocean: A story of life, the sea, and dancing to the fossil record"
by Brad Matsen and Ray Troll. Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, California.