Welcome Back to the Past…

The Back to the Past Museum is the world’s first trilobite exclusive museum. Formed in 2008, the Back to the Past Museum is the culmination of a few trilobite enthusiasts wanting to spread their passion.

The museum is home to one of the world’s finest trilobite collections, with nearly 300 different trilobite species on display!

The museum will be constantly changing and evolving as new discoveries are made. The objective of the museum is to inspire a new generation of enthusiasts, paleontologists, and fossil collectors.

 

TRILOBITES

("three-lobes") are extinct arthropods that form the class Trilobita. They appeared in the Early Cambrian period and flourished throughout the lower Paleozoic era before beginning a drawn-out decline to extinction when, during the Late Devonian extinction, all trilobite orders, with the sole exception of Proetida, died out.

The last of the trilobites disappeared in the mass extinction at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago (m.y.a.). Trilobites are very well-known, and possibly the second-most famous fossil group, after the dinosaurs. When trilobites appear in the fossil record of the Lower Cambrian they were already highly diverse and geographically dispersed. Because of their diversity and an easily fossilized exoskeleton, they left an extensive fossil record with some 17,000 known species spanning Paleozoic time. Trilobites have been important in biostratigraphy, paleontology, and plate tectonics research.