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I mention all this to explain why on a gray day in February I went to the Natural History Museum in London to meet a cheerful, vaguely rumpled, very likeable paleontologist named Richard Fortey.
我提这一切，是为了解释为什么我在阴沉沉的一天前往伦敦的自然史博物馆，会见一位性格开朗、有点不修边幅、非常讨人喜欢的古生物学家。他的名字叫理查德·福泰。
Fortey knows an awful lot about an awful lot. He is the author of a wry, splendid book called Life: An Unauthorised Biography, which covers the whole pageant of animate creation. But his first love is a type of marine creature called trilobites that once teemed in Ordovician seas but haven't existed for a long time except in fossilized form. All shared a basic body plan of three parts, or lobes—head, tail, thorax—from which comes the name. Fortey found his first when he was a boy clambering over rocks at St. David's Bay in Wales. He was hooked for life.
福泰的知识面极广。他是一本幽默而又精彩的书的作者，书名叫做《生命：一部未经授权的传记》。该书涉及创造生命的全过程。但是，他最钟爱的是一种名叫三叶虫的海生动物。那种动物一度充满奥陶纪的海洋，但早已不复存在，除了以化石的形式。三叶虫的身体都有个相同的基本结构，分为三个部分或三片叶——头、尾和胸。三叶虫的名字由此而来。福泰在孩提时代就发现了第一个三叶虫化石，当时他正攀越威尔士圣戴维海湾的岩壁。结果，他一生都对三叶虫着了迷。
He took me to a gallery of tall metal cupboards. Each cupboard was filled with shallow drawers, and each drawer was filled with stony trilobites—twenty thousand specimens in all.
他把我带到一个四周都是高高的金属柜子的陈列室。每个柜子上都有许多不深的抽屉，每个抽屉里都塞满了三叶虫化石——总共有2万件标本。
It seems like a big number, he agreed, "but you have to remember that millions upon millions of trilobites lived for millions upon millions of years in ancient seas, so twenty thousand isn't a huge number. And most of these are only partial specimens. Finding a complete trilobite fossil is still a big moment for a paleontologist."
“看来真是不少，”他表示同意，“不过，你要记住，成万亿只三时虫在古代的海洋里生活了成亿年，因此2万这个数字不算多。而其中大部分仅仅是不完整的标本。发现一块完整的三叶虫化石对古生物学家来说，仍是一件大事。”
Trilobites first appeared—fully formed, seemingly from nowhere—about 540 million years ago, near the start of the great outburst of complex life popularly known as the Cambrian explosion, and then vanished, along with a great deal else, in the great and still mysterious Permian extinction 300,000 or so centuries later.
三时虫最初出现在大约54000万年以前，接近复杂生命大爆发即通常所谓的寒武纪大爆发的起始时刻。它们已经完全成形，仿佛从天而降。然后，在30000万年以后。三叶虫跟许多别的生物一起在二叠纪大灭绝的时候消失了。那次大灭绝至今仍是个谜。
