Trilobite con pista
‘Trilobite con pista’, it says. No, it’s not an item on the Italian menu in the restaurant at lunch time, but the label on a fossil in the Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia. The Italian for Trilobite is clearly Trilobite, but what does ‘con pista’ mean? ‘Con’ must mean ‘with’ and ‘pista’ must mean ‘track’, like piste is a skiing track. It’s a Trilobite with its tracks.
Sometime in the distant past, in the Cambrian era (it’s the Cambriano in Italiano), a Trilobite scurried across the muddy sea bed, leaving its tracks and then met a catastrophic death which preserved every outline of its body and its tracks.
Trilobites existed for 270 million years and then all died out. I’m sure there must be a lesson there for our recently arrived species. If only we knew what it was.
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