The Original Roly Poly

This is my entry to the Close Up & Macro Photography flickr group monthly topic 'AGE'. I really struggled with this topic - age implies old or maybe the passage of time. But it also refers to a period of time, like the Age of Steam or Age of Dinosaurs. Once I had the fossil association, it was easy to come up with something truly old. A picture of a trilobite would do quite nicely.

So, I had a word with Gillian who runs the Cockburn Geological Museum, School of GeoSciences where I work. She suggested this rather fetching trilobite, a phacops latifrons from the Eifel. This particular specimen was described in a paper by Euan Clarkson, "Fine structure of the eye in two species of Phacops (Trilobita)", Palaeontology, 10 (1967).