Anacheirurus adserai

This is a “baby” specimen of a fully developed trilobite.

Trilobites, being arthropods and having an external skeleton, were forced to carry out mutes to increase its size, changing the skeleton for a larger one and getting rid of the old useless one, exuvio. A trilobite molted several times throughout its life.

The Fezouata deposits, near the Moroccan city of Zagora, are providing a rich sample of a fauna similar, although later in time, to the famous Burgess Shale (Canada). We are talking about fossils between 480 and 472 million years old. The age indicates that the Burgess Shale type communities were not restricted, as was believed, to the early stages of the Cambrian and then suddenly disappeared, but rather they survived much longer, coexisted with the later fauna and would be the normal type of deep sea fauna throughout the planet. So Morocco was an ocean and was over the South Pole.