Trilobites tell me of ancient marine shores teeming with budding life, when silence was only broken by the wind, the breaking of the waves, or by the thunder of storms and volcanoes. The struggle for survival already had its toll in the seas, but only natural laws and events determined the fate of evolving life forms. No footprints were to be found on those shores, as life had not yet conquered land. Genocide had not been invented as yet, and the threat to life on Earth resided only with the comets and asteroids.
All fossils are, in a way, time capsules that can transport our imagination to unseen shores, lost in the sea of eons that preceded us. The time of trilobites is unimaginably far away, and yet, with relatively little effort, we can dig out these messengers of our past and hold them in our hand. And, if we learn the language, we can read their message. <...>
