This is a spectacularly prepared, 1.9" long Leonaspis trilobite collected from the Lhandar Formation near Atchana, Morocco. All of the limestone has been painstakingly removed from around the trilobite leaving it flying on a pedestal of rock. This would have taken dozens of hours of work under high magnification by a very skilled preparitor to accomplish. Total restoration is about 3-4%
 
Trilobites were a very diverse group of extinct marine arthropods. They first appeared in the fossil record in the Early Cambrian (521 million years ago) and went extinct during the Permian mass extinction (250 million years ago).