Trilobites, ubiquitous Paleozoic arthropods as collaged linocut prints

 

Trilobite: Cheirurus ingricus prints Ele Willoughby, 2020

Trilobite: Cheirurus ingricus prints Ele Willoughby, 2020

My latest Paleozoic print once again takes advantage of a segmented fossil body to add colour and pattern with collaged Japanese washi papers. This member of the ubiquitous and wildly successful trilobites, prehistoric creatures which lived for hundreds of millions of years, was a Cheirurus ingricus which lived during the Late Cambrian through the Early Devonian era.

Cheirurus lived from about 500 million years ago to 390 million years ago. Trilobites were arthropods (as are modern day insects, lobsters, shrimp and more) which left fossils of their exoskeletons worldwide. There are many thousands of different species and their fossils have been important  to biostratigraphy, paleontology, evolutionary biology, and plate tectonics. It was hard to choose which one to portray as there are tens of thousands of different species of these critters, but I thought they were well suited to collaged segments.