Trilobites in Louisville

After finding a trilobite imprint in a rock I dug up, my cousin recommended I start breaking the rock apart to see if there were any more. Sure enough, another one appeared that had been partial sheared off. I then tried extract more of it from the rock which worked pretty well. At that point I should have taken a picture but instead I started to try and break that part of the rock away from the main section. When I was hitting on the rock, the force of the impact caused the tail and part of the center of its back to break away thus leaving the image shown below. The rock is like a mudstone and crumbles very easily.

After publishing this post earlier, I did some more research and found that trilobites are arthropods. Their bodies are divided into three sections: cephalon, thorax, and phygidium. In the picture below, I labeled part of the spine breaking away but that was the thorax. They do have spines but in the sense of pointed parts that stick out to fend off predators.



The Trilobite imprint below has been further revealed after using a small awl and hammer to remove pieces of it. It looks like this relatively large trilobite was squished and twisted when it got buried in this mud. I will need to get ruler next to them next time I take a picture.