How to Use trilobite in a Sentence

trilobite

noun
Definition of trilobitenext
  • The trilobites were blind, so they couldn’t have queued up by sight.
    — Eva Frederick, Science | AAAS, 17 Oct. 2019
  • That’s right—all of the beetles that look like trilobites are females.
    — Thomas Marent, National Geographic, 27 Oct. 2016
  • This is the first time researchers have been able to describe a trilobite that was translucent.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 13 Aug. 2020
  • Some 290 million years ago, as the last trilobites scuttled across the seafloor, the skies above grew just a little more ominous.
    — Quanta Magazine, 17 Jan. 2019
  • Think trilobites to the woolly mammoth with T. rex in between.
    — Susan Faust, San Francisco Chronicle, 24 May 2018
  • Ancient creatures such as trilobites and brachiopods could not cope with the changes, and many of them went extinct.
    — Alexandra Witze, WIRED, 5 Jan. 2011
  • And while that sucked for trilobites, life was eventually able to make a comeback.
    — David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 22 Dec. 2017
  • His kite was in the shape of a trilobite, an ancient marine animal that lived some 500 million years ago.
    — Frank Vaisvilas, Daily Southtown, 1 May 2018
  • And the eye told scientists something else about the trilobite in general.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 13 Aug. 2020
  • The team speculates that the trilobite may have been molting, which could explain the feeding frenzy.
    — Jack Tamisiea, Scientific American, 28 Sep. 2023
  • The researchers found that its appendages would have been damaged while grabbing onto hard prey like trilobites.
    — Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 5 July 2023
  • It’s a centimeter-long trilobite called Aulacopleura koninckii that split in half as the rock layer was peeled apart.
    — Scott K. Johnson, Ars Technica, 15 Aug. 2020
  • From above, Palm Jumeirah resembles a palm tree with spreading branches, or maybe a trilobite fossil.
    — David Owen, The New Yorker, 29 May 2017
  • The event took its hardest toll on marine organisms such as corals, shelled brachiopods, eel-like creatures called conodonts, and the trilobites.
    — Michael Greshko, National Geographic, 30 Sep. 2019
  • All the site’s trilobites are also juveniles, suggesting that this could have been a nursery.
    — Jack Tamisiea, Scientific American, 10 May 2023
  • Taken together, these factors led the researchers to speculate that the trilobites had died in the midst of their ill-fated conga line.
    — Eva Frederick, Science | AAAS, 17 Oct. 2019
  • For instance, on some of the fossils, other types of trilobites occasionally appear to be joining the line.
    — Michael Greshko, National Geographic, 17 Oct. 2019
  • Utah, too, has one of the most complete fossil records on the planet, starting 2 billion years ago and featuring everything from mollusks to trilobites.
    — Sofia Quaglia, Discover Magazine, 21 Dec. 2023
  • No plants, no animals, certainly nothing that even compared to the great diversity of life in the sea, which teemed with trilobites, crustaceans, bristly worms, and soft squid-like creatures.
    — Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, 12 July 2017
  • The ancient soft parts are offering new insights into the behavior of trilobites, the insect-like creatures that ruled Earth’s early seas for hundreds of millions of years.
    — National Geographic, 6 Feb. 2017
  • This particular trilobite could see about 200 facets or pixels.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 13 Aug. 2020
  • The eye’s anatomy indicates the trilobite lived in a bright, shallow-water environment.
    — Riley Black, Scientific American, 13 Aug. 2020
  • But one major aspect of trilobites’ ecology that had long eluded researchers was their diet.
    — Jack Tamisiea, Scientific American, 28 Sep. 2023
  • From one layer to the next one above, no more trilobites or nightmarish placoderms or dimetrodons—entire animal reigns and ecosystems have vanished.
    — Manu Saadia, Ars Technica, 4 Sep. 2017
  • One of the most successful early animals, trilobites lived in variety of lifestyles.
    — David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 4 May 2018
  • In the case of one particular 429-million-year-old trilobite—an extinct arthropod that looked like a big version of a wood louse—a crack in just the right place has allowed paleontologists to see the world through the creature’s eyes.
    — Riley Black, Scientific American, 13 Aug. 2020
  • Arrayed behind them, in majestic costumes by Loren Shaw that fuse the papal with the insectoid (they are meant to suggest trilobites, long extinct), is a choir called the Crossing, softly chanting.
    — Laura Collins-Hughes, New York Times, 24 Sep. 2017
  • This isn’t the first line of the little trilobites ever discovered, reports Michael Greshko at National Geographic.
    — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 22 Oct. 2019
  • A Clovis Paleo Indian point and an Isotelus trilobite signify the rare geological artifacts that can be found in the area.
    — cleveland.com, 13 July 2017
  • The trilobite’s eye is very different from our own, Schoenemann notes, because it is made up of dozens of facets that would have created a mosaic image of the creature’s environment.
    — Riley Black, Scientific American, 13 Aug. 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'trilobite.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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