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Psychopyge
Family: Acastidae
Era: Early Devonian, specifically the Eifelian
Locality: Jbel Issoumour
Size: About 3" - 5"
Psychopyge-3
This is one of the more popular, and difficult to find, trilobites coming out of
Morocco. Buyers beware, there are a lot of fakes of this species out there
because they can make a very good one from a mold. Do a thorough check on your
specimen before purchase. Look at this guy, you can tell why this guy is so
popular:
- large "lance"
- long genal spines
- a myriad of side spines coming from the sides and the tail
- a single horn coming from the cephalon
- fine compound lense eyes
So what is that lance for??? I like to think that it's good for ramming things
with, like the spike on the moroccanites or Jules Verne's Nautilus. If you look
closely at the "lance", you can tell that its finely textured with mini spikes.
When rolled up, this guy would be very well protected indeed. With all the big
spikes, why the tiny head spike? Which curls back? Don't know, I'm suggesting
sexual dimorphism again.
Psychopyge-twin
This is one exciting piece! You have two psychopygi in action! This is an actual
piece of course, nothing is posed. So you can see how they carry themselves
while moving around. You can just picture them moving with streamline movement.
There's also an asteropyge sitting around. Personally, I think the psychopyges
were stalking the asteropyge and planning to run him through. Look that them,
they're both ganging up on the little guy! They just have to use the lance to
turn him over and he's exposed!
This is a really beautiful 3-dimensional piece, the pictures can't capture all
the beautiful movements in this piece.
Psychopyge-3
In this piece, the psychopyge is partially enrolled. Why is the lance curling to
his left? I don't know. The head horn is missing from this piece but that may
have been done during preparation. Could it be molting? Might it be one of the
opposite sex? We can only speculate.
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