Beecher's Trilobite Bed is a thin layer within the Late Ordovician Frankfort Shale near Rome, New York, roughly four hundred and fifty million years old, in which trilobites and other arthropods were preserved through pyritization, replacement of their soft tissue and appendages by pyrite, in far greater anatomical detail, including legs, gills and antennae, than trilobite fossils typically allow. First excavated by Yale paleontologist Charles Emerson Beecher in the 1890s, the bed remains one of the primary sources for understanding trilobite limb anatomy.
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