05/17/2026
I’ve split on some wild bugs in the last 10 years but I don’t think I’ve ever felt a thrill as strong as I did on Thursday afternoon. and myself stopped on the shores of Lake Ontario, near Clarington to burn a couple hours on splitting washups during a roadtrip to Ottawa. Lake worn, fine grained black chunks of shale are infrequently distributed on the beach and typically, when split, contain storm lens hash plates of trilobite molts, pyritized cephalopods, brachiopods and sometimes- if you’re lucky- a triarthrus trilobite. To say I wasn’t expecting splitting on a 6.4cm, perfect Pseudogygites latimarginatus would be an understatement (it has eye lenses!!!!). So, for context, this species used to be unbelievably common in Georgian bay oil shales and the last generation of collectors may be winding up for a big yawn here but for me, this is THE trilobite. This is the trilobite that crawled into my imagination as a kid growing up in Collingwood and lit the fuse on a lifelong obsession with the trilobite form. My dad collected these when he was a kid and sold them by the roadside when they used to be accessible and everywhere. The Royal Ontario Museum, before fieldwork meant more than just the Burgess, used to get my dad (again, when he was a kid) to point out his latest finds on the shoreline of Craigleith where he grew up. I like to imagine that there’s some old dusty crates in some forgotten storeroom in the bowels of the ROM that contains things he helped find. So, I guess I’m saying this guy hit me right in the feels when I wasn’t expecting to find so much as a thorax in this chunk of oil shale that I fished out of the violent surf on a sunny Thursday afternoon. Instant regression to being an annoyingly curious 10 yr old again. This one is going in my dining room. Thanks for reading if you made it this far, I appreciate you.
