A number of years ago, I took a few moments - well about a couple of hours to be precise - out of a busy working week to stop off and the Much Wenlock Museum's geology display with it's model of a Silurian Sea. Armed with a small booklet called Shropshire Geology: A Visitor's Guide (Paperback), I then went in search of trilobites near a location called Upper Millichope Farm and found these two little beauties in the loose rocks in the bank of a small stream that ran along the roadside in that area.
These two images look pretty much like the Silurian trilobite, Dalmanites mycops and ,as it says in Shrophire Geology, it is typically only the tail (technically pygidium). We have the left side pleural region and the axis. Sadly there is no evidence of the slight spike, for want of a better word, at the end of the pygidium.
The second fossil from the same location looks, to my mind slightly different. Again it is only the pygidium but this time we have partial left and right pleural regions as well as axis. Again ,extensive damage, presumably by water erosion has removed part of the pygidium and there is no clarity at the base of the pygidium, which is a pity. I still maintain that the pygidium looks rounder than that of d. mycops and so I am tempted to suggest that this may be a different species.
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