The trilobites, of course, overall have a fantastic variety of morphologies — fantastic variety of shapes. So you would expect them to have many diff… - Richard Fortey

One lies upturned on the sand. Its tail sake waggles feebly, quite unable to perform the task of turning the body back over again. Five paris of legs twitch ineffectually in a vain attempt to achieve the same end. I find it impossible to resist the temptation to right the poor animal. It is easy to grasp it by the edges of the head-shield. Once righted again those spindly legs allow the crab to trundle slowly away. Its behaviour seem at once strangely determined, but also apparently random, like the slow progress of a confused old lady on a .

It was that did it for me. “Dr was an eccentric in the grand manner … he always wore hand-tooled cowboy boots with elaborate curlicues in the stitching and a hat and jacket to match. He was very shortsighted, and tended to stumble along in the purposeful way adopted by the cartoon character Mr Magoo, while mumbling vigorously to himself.”
The Magoo lookalike also carries a whip and a six-shooter, but that is not what matters most about him: what matters is that he was an expert on the s of the .
.. A book that starts with slimy things in the oceans and continues to the dawn of human civilisation in the must offer more than just a procession of challenging concepts and unfamiliar words, and accordingly up pops Mr Magoo, with whom Fortey (himself big on the trilobites of the Ordovician) once shared a hotel room.

I ought to introduce you to trilobites ... fossil arthropods distantly related to the s and s of today, but very distantly related — enormously diverse in the ... rocks ... with an evolutionary history of their own of several hundred millions of years ...