Papers from the 6th International Conference on Trilobites and their Relatives / Доклады 6-й Международной конференции по трилобитам и их родственникам

The proceedings of the first International Conference on Trilobites and their Relatives held in Oslo in 1973 (Bruton 2019) were published in one of the earliest editions of Fossils and Strata (Martinsson 1975). It is highly fitting, therefore, that with the return of the conference to Baltoscandia (P€arnaste 2018), the Lethaia Foundation, under whose auspices Fossils and Strata is published, kindly offered to publish a volume of papers arising from the sixth meeting held in Tallinn, Estonia, in July 2017. The papers in the volume vary considerably in length. Although a notional page limit was given, it was made clear from the outset that there was some flexibility in this. The submission of a manuscript of almost monographic proportions (Geyer 2019) stretched this flexibility beyond what we had originally envisaged but the evident importance of the submission convinced us that it should be included. Geyer describes the remarkably diverse trilobite fauna from the lower Cambrian in the Anti-Atlas of Morocco, particularly the important global reference Tiot section. This fauna is crucial to the understanding of the earliest history of the trilobites and to the concept and correlation of Cambrian Series 2 and Stage 3. In the latter context, it enables a revised subdivision of the lowest of the Moroccan trilobite biozones. The paper includes descriptions of some 35 species, of which ten are new as are six genera. It includes description of the oldest unequivocally determinable trilobites from western Gondwana and possibly the world. The overall reassessment of the Bigotinidae involves revision of genera and species from other countries and the establishment of a new family
within the Redlichiida. <...>