Crotalocephalus trilobite

A Clockwork Trilobite

This project began as a gift for my friend who shares a passion for evolutionary biology—a Crotalocephalus† trilobite carved from a piece of soapstone.

† Crotalocephalus is a genus of extinct marine arthropods that lived from the Late Silurian to the Early Devonian, around 430—400 million years ago. Remains have been found in Australia, Asia, Africa, and Europe.

As a nod to the laws of Darwin’s evolutionary clockwork, I carved small gears and cogs into the back of the trilobite where its exoskeleton had ‘eroded’.

I often end up attached to my creations so I decided to take a cast and play around with reproductions later.

I cast the trilobite body out of polyurethane resin with a heavy mix of bronze powder.

First polyurethane resin cast

I wanted a more realistic look so I filled in the gears with clay and made another mould. In the casting, I used sand and pebbles to simulate sandstone.

For sale at the SA Museum

For sale in the South Australian Museum

More trilobites were made to show at the SALA Festival in a solo exhibition themed around fossil fuels.

When large quantities of dead organisms (dinosaurs, trilobites, etc) are buried underneath rock and subjected to intense heat and pressure over millions of years, fossil fuels are formed. These carbon-heavy fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—bear fingerprints of their creation, depending on the organisms that went into them. Each fuel is unique to where the creatures lived, how they died, where they ended up, and what kinds of temperatures and pressures they experienced.

SALA exhibition

Petroleum by-products are useful materials derived from crude oil. There are thousands of such products, including plastic, paraffin wax, ink, resin, and soap. Even Aspirin.