Preparation on a KILLER Metacanthina Trilobite from North Africa

Happy New Year! Wether you're a new visitor to the site, a returning client or a competitor just sneaking a peek at what I'm up to: Welcome! I'm glad you're here. With the advent of the new year and a blistering cold-snap, I figured it was a good time for another blog posting. This time the subject is a gorgeous Metacanthina issoumourensis trilobite from Alnif, Morocco.

This trilobite was a surprise Xmas gift from my buddy Mark (my original startup partner in Stormbed). A talented artist and preparator himself, this was a bug he had started the work on however with his own intense business obligations, he's too busy to prep. Being a big fan of asteropyge trilobites, every time I'd go over to his place I would go slather my greasy eyeballs all over this unfinished trilobite. On the weekend he dropped by with a box of rocks (the rock hound version of boxes of chocolates!) and deposited this beauty into my hands.

For those of you unfamiliar with Moroccan trilobites, they are among the best preserved trilobite fossils found on earth. One of the top features of preservation in these fossils is their dimensionality. These trilobites are often completely devoid of any distortions, compression or fossil collateral damage (ie - there's a horn coral punched through the eye of your otherwise perfect Eldredgeops or a crinoidal stem element has left a hideous perfect circle punched into the thorax of your Greenops). The balancing element here is that the trilobites are more-often-than-not encased in some of the most brutally hard limestone-matrix on earth. Trilobite hunters in Morocco work in obscenely hot conditions with pickaxes and hammers to unearth our specimens. Fossils are a huge industry in the country and many, many people can be involved in the supply chain. This means that getting specimens that are quality and well prepared takes a bit more work and patience on the part of the collector. Unfortunately, where there is collector interest, there is fakery and the fake market in Morocco is HUGE! Franken-bugs made of various specimens, restored horns, spikes and eyes not disclosed to buyers or straight up fake molds of real specimens are all too common. Also unfortunate is that because of this reputation, most people with glancing familiarity with Moroccan fossils will call real fossils fake out of hand simply due to their life-like appearance. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" -Alexander Pope

There have been countless excellent articles on how to spot the methods and elements of fakery so I won't make this a needlessly longer blog. Luckily, there are many reputable and excellent dealers of both prepared and un-prepared specimens- ask around online, they're not hard to find.

On prepared specimens: The prep technology in Morocco has been vastly improved, often by Americans and Europeans who have built friendships and helped them upgrade their labs with modern equipment and techniques. That said, many experienced workers have an absolute mastery and understanding of the trilobites themselves. Some of the best preparators working today are Moroccans who have made a career of it. Working under conditions and with equipment that would make our North-American heads spin, they nonetheless produce world-class work. Search 'Comura Morocco' in google image search if you're not familiar with the epic skills involved.

Personally, I prefer to prepare them myself to guarantee the prep and to know exactly where (if any) restoration is present. I'm also leery of 'middle-man' profiting off a hard-working people who often work for mere dollars per hour so I do not buy prepped fossils for resale. These bugs are also very challenging (even the basic proetids) and will up your prep game and in particular, your scribe skills. If you're learning to prep, there's no better teacher than these hateful blocks of the hardest damn rock you've ever put a tool to.

Back to the bug: As I mentioned, Mark had done a lot of the heavy lifting on this guy by exposing the centre of the dorsal surface but the devil, as they say, is in the details. Typical of unprepared Moroccan material, the trilobite was found in cross-section. Using the location of the cross section to inform us of likely species, the best thing is to start scribing out the bug on one exposed side (before glueing the cross section back together). I like tapping in a little thin star-bond glue to protect the exposed shell edges BEFORE I start- this rock tends to shatter and take tiny bits of shell with it into the spent powder-strewn wasteland that is your work station. If I took a picture right now of the inside of my workstation BTW it could likely double as winter landscape photography.

Once you have exposed some of the bug and have taken a note as to it's position (ie arched, prone, enrolled etc) you can now glue the cross-section together by clamp and glue method. I again, like to use starbond for this. Ensure you have a perfect, tight fit or wallow in despair as a 1mm opening looks like the bloody grand canyon under a microscope.

For nearly all my 'scribe off the bug' projects, my ultimate weapon is the HW322 scribe from Hardy Winkler. These things are German-made excellence and are highly variable. I bought mine in Tucson 2020 before the shit hit the fan with the pandemic from Stone Co, his American distributer. For bulk work I have the HW70, an amazing tool that has a working limit of 35PSI but mops the floor with the ME9100 and other 'bulk' scribes. Total prep time was 8 hours (not including Marks' effort, sorry buddy). Below is a video of ten minutes of scribing with the 322 condensed to 37 seconds.

As you might imagine, Preparing these trilobites is very time-consuming. Patience is a virtue. Some of the spiny trilobites can command 40-60 hours of painstaking work. Even a great deal of skilled preppers are going to leave a few dings in the shell, myself included. When buying prepared specimens, look for sellers that will show the bug under a macro lens. Typically, this will reveal all including restoration. Metacanthina specimens like this one have granulose shell texture. If that texture is gone, it's been potentially blasted off with over-abrading, closeups are a must. If the subject is photographed from only one angle- ask to see the other side. One thing I really try to avoid as a seller is a buyer being bummed out or having regrets when they get their specimen. I try my best to show 'warts and all'.

The next slide- er I mean video is just a smash cut of various stages of preparation which then reveals the final bug in all it's alcohol-soaked glory (for the uninitiated, alcohol doesn't harm the fossil and brings out the texture of the piece in stark details). Following the video are my macro photos of the finished bug. I hope you enjoyed my ramblings and musings and I'll be back soon for the next one! All the best in 2025 (provided your president doesn't annex us this year)!

Mike Meacher, Owner/Hominid - Stormbed Paleontological