Atlas Obscura has a piece about trilobites… golden trilobites.  Trilobites are some of the most desirable fossils and highly detailed, pyritized trilobites are especially desirable.  “Beecher’s Bed” is a famous trilobite quarry discovered and named for Charles Emerson Beecher, a paleontologist a the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.  It is made of good old Ordovician shale and loaded with stunning trilobite specimens, all preserved in golden pyrite.  First excavated in 1893, it was lost in 1904 after Beecher’s untimely death, because he never recorded the location.  It was found again in 1982.  Markus Martin took over the site in 2009.

Unlike most prospectors who seek their fortune in gold, Markus Martin got lucky on his very first try. He’d come to a desolate patch of forest in upstate New York in hot pursuit of trilobites. It was the early 2000s and Martin’s day job was in finance, but he was far more interested in the treasures of another era: the Ordovician, from 485 to 444 million years ago, when trilobites roamed the sea that covered most of what is now North America. But Martin wasn’t looking for more ordinary trilobite fossils in muddy brown and dull black rocks. He was looking for glittering ones, whose soft tissues had been filled in perfectly with pyrite, the mineral commonly known as fool’s gold.

Martin was no fool. He knew the fossil beds in the area had a reputation for holding these brilliantly preserved arthropods, and he’d spent the hostile New York winter reading up to ascertain the best place to start looking. Martin scoured Microsoft’s TerraServer (this was a world before Google Maps) and picked a hill in an area riddled with slivers of canyons running 200 feet down into the shale, just three miles off a road and close to where he lived in Oneida County. Martin got permission from the landowner to search the area, and as soon as it was warm enough, he drove up with a backpack and a hammer. “I expected this was going nowhere, and that on Monday I’d go back to work with not much to say,” he says. But when he reached the base of the hill, he saw tiny, glittering trilobites sprinkling the forest floor, like flecks of gold in a river. “To say I was surprised is an understatement,” he says. Martin picked up as many as he could carry, around 30 specimens, piled them into his backpack, and lugged it all home.