Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology: Trilobita (Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology Vol. I) (Hardcover)

~ Raymond C. Moore (Editor)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 260 pages
• Publisher: Geological Society of America (November 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813731151
• ISBN-13: 978-0813731155
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 7.5 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,303,980 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Definitive, September 19, 2000

By	Christopher Clowes (Wellington, NA New Zealand) - See all my reviews

At last, volume one of the long-awaited update to Moore's 1959 epic.  It is difficult to understand the monumental amount of work in one of these volumes of the Treatise without reading through it.  Take the chapter on ontogeny, for example.   How do we know how a trilobite developed?  After all, we can hardly watch one.   Only by collecting hundreds of fossils - at first, no doubt, misidentified as different species - and comparing them, across collection, institution, and probably national boundaries: work which may take multiple workers decades. The 530 pages of this volume represents whole lifetimes of dedicated research.

The Treatise is a technical reference for professional palaeontologists so you will want to be a very enthusiastic amateur before you consider buying it. If you are, though, then this is definitely the definitive word on trilobite morphology, habit, ontogeny, evolution and classification available today. It is not a complete systematic review of the whole class, however: This is the first volume of a work which is expected to stretch to three. Systematic descriptions are given for the Agnostida and Redlichiida only.

Readers familiar with the 1959 version will first notice that the familiar line drawings have been almost totally replaced by excellent (at least 600 dpi) photographs of actual fossils. As before, taxonomic descriptions are provided down to generic level, providing authorship, synonymy, diagnostic morphology, type species and provenance.