Made in Morocco

That's what the sticker on my trilobite fossil says. I know it's just legalese to indicate the country of origin, but my inner snark still loves it — the very idea that people could "make" a fossil. Prepare, yes. Make,....

Well.

It turns out that there is a thriving cottage industry in fake fossils. In Morocco. And not just any fossils, either: ohhh, no. No, they specialize. In trilobite fossils.

I have very little intellectual interest in trilobites. But I have an utterly unaccountable emotional interest in them. They are, to me, the ur-fossils. I take it rather personally that they are all extinct — as if their extinction was an act of cosmic spite directed at me. Trilobites manage to look both cute and mean at the same time. They's my inner invertebrate instantiated. They lasted for eons, then suddenly vanished, leaving us with — what? Crabs and lobsters? Give me a freakin' break.

So I've wanted a trilobite for years, but usually the options are a thumbnail-sized one on a 5 x 8" piece of sandstone for $25 or more – honestly, why bother? – , or larger ones so painstakingly prepared that they're practically sculptures and are priced accordingly. Aside from being far to dear for my means, the precise preparation makes them seem artificial to me (and now I know that they may very well have been), because, as I have only ever seen fossilized trilobites, the quality of petrifaction is integral to my Platonic trilobite. They need to reveal their stony substance. So when I found a roughly-prepared 1.5 x 2" trilobite in Devonian limestone at one of the many gift shops inside the National Museum of Natural History, and for a very reasonable price, I was thrilled.

Now, I said I've not much intellectual interest in trilobites. Plural. But this one is my trilobite, and that makes it different. So I wanted to know more about it than just the "Trilobite - Morocco" that was on the label. And so I came to learn about Morocco's production capacity for genuine faux trilobites.

A couple of Germans made a study of fakes a couple of years ago. Best of all (or not, depending on how much you've got at risk, I suppose), they have an illustrated list of characteristic giveaways of fakes. In my case, I would have been vastly more disappointed than angry to find that the Smithsonian Institution had sold me a fake — my idea being that the Smithsonian would be concerned about their rep and my loss would thus be limited to a little inconvenience and a lot of disappointment. So I went through the list. Pits on the fossil surface from air bubbles in resin? No. Matching crack lines through genuine matrix and fossil? Yes. Fine surface details as on genuine fossils? Yes. Glow (fake) or not (real) under a blacklight? No.

So it seems the Smithsonian and I can both breathe a sigh of relief, and I can continue to take pride in what is almost certainly an Asteropygin Phacopid, and I think is a Hollardops sp., or maybe a Greenops sp.

Update 30 June 2009: Further surfingresearch suggests that Greenops may be a New World genus and Hollardops an Old World one, which would make mine the latter.