Fossil gleaners of whatsoever stripe, amateurs, professionals, mercenaries, share the awareness that what we all are after has been long dead and buried. Likewise, whomsoever also has a gambler's hope against the odds knows that that which might again be brought to light by the restless, almost life-like quiverings of the earth's mantle is something undiscovered, unknown, undreamed of, and naturally, that it might be you-know-who that finds it.

Recall the time when there were mother ogres, distraught step-daughters, blessed fairy godmothers. In a twice-told tale the disdained virgin pined away in the dank sculleries while the prince of the realm, sated with the way-laying tentacles of the invidious, longed for the enchantress that would fulfill ill his dream. What a story! Cinderella to Prima Donna. Cinderella she seemed to be for a long time until this amateur invited Prof. Leonardo Branisa, Bolivia's reigning paleontologist, on a trip from Cochabamba to Sucre.

Most of the journey goes through rugged mountainous terrain with scattered vales that make for a steep goat pasture or a tilted cornfield. The exception is the 30 km long, narrow valley always throat-parched where from time immemorial Quechua-speaking farmers have eked out their rhythms from dry to drier, not the fiestas but the seasons. In a quaint custom rarely seen in other Andean communities the minimal rustic huts are accompanied by round, about 8' high silos roofed with what strikes the passer-by as a Chinese coolie hat. Host to the regional fairs is the town of Aiquile. The only surprise to a Spaniard fast-forwarded from the 18th century would be an occasional dangling light bulb and the cement main street, finally laid at the anguished plea of the neighbors tired of the dust churned by trucks freighting cement north from Sucre. Unfortunately it too sustained damage in a recent earthquake that shook the region.

Not exactly what you would call a watering hole, Aiquile did offer "posadas" for people travelling to the colonial capital, now site of Bolivia's Supreme Court. What else to attract someone overnight? I should be entitled to a commission given the variety of company I have housed for the one pure purpose of this journal. Coming south into the valley at the hamlet of Negro Pujio, a shy waif offered me a rolled specimen of Matacryphaeus rotundatus that I passed on to Dr. G. D. Edgecombe in Sydney. He hailed the opportunity to study the protective structures of the Calmoniid Family.

Branisa and Smith turned east from Aiquile on a side jaunt to scout for Devonian outcroppings that might disgorge trilobites and other delights. On a hillside some 22 km from town a neighborhood path curved past the shade of a desert acacia. Erosion was scratching away the shrouds that had blanketed the marine life from long ago. Among the specimens I recovered that day was a hardened lump of clay, a size to nestle in your hand, just bisymmetrical enough to dare you to be disrespectful.

The Cinderella in the story did step out; so did the concretion, for the Andes of central Bolivia. Certainly no better place to seek recognition than the inner sanctum of the American Museum of Natural History. Of course it had to pass several checkpoints: was it for real? no fakery? no mere geode? no threat to human life? At last the fairy godmother experience: the magic wand to see through the grime of ages, to CT-scan its real potential wafted by a youngish paleo with a heavy New York accent. Sorcery in the guise of Niles Eldredge, who with his colleague Stephen J. Gould had recently shaken the biological world with their concept of evolution paced by punctuated equilibrium.

Dr. Eldredge had had several prior experiences that made him levitate to a microscope exhilarated with what he already perceived as the inner glow of this belle at the ball. On the one hand, as a trilobite specialist he had already resolved several problems concerning American phacopids. Here he was face to face with a Bolivian fossil, and not long before he had submitted evidence that a spiny Bolivian trilobite thought to be a phacopid was in fact a convergent member of an entirely different family. Furthermore, as a student Eldredge had studied certain unique features of the horseshoe crab, Liumulus polyphemus, known widely as a "living fossil". Among the arthropods this non-crab is categorized as a xiphosurid in the Class Merostomata.

In order to adequately prepare the little rock for her coming out, Eldredge entrusted her to the tender, loving care of the ace preparator, Frank Lombardi. He cleaned her properly, brought out her hidden graces, made up her eyes ... Eyes? The paleontologists who had scrutinized her before, if they even granted she was legitimate, failed to see the eye facets studding the brows. Niles picked them out with that first peek through the lenses. With all that Cinderella was revealed as a wonderfully preserved Devonian horseshoe crab. The world stopped to stare, to admire -- at an exhibit of the month it the great hall of the Museum, and at the NATO-sponsored Arthropod Conference in Norway in 1973; she was now presented with her full scientific name: Legrandella lombardii.

No mere queen for a day, Ms. Legrandella lombardii continues to win world recognition. Before bringing on the accolades we should clarify that other "kin" have turned up. A very good likeness was found in a drawer of Bolivian fossils at the Smithsonian. An associate of Prof. Branisa is known to have collected a sample some km to the north of Aiquile. A lucky paleontologist in Bolivia spied a partial cephalon in a pile of fossils for sale by a street vendor in Cochabamba. Last, perhaps least, but much to my satisfaction, collecting with Dr. Greg Edgecombe at the famous locality of Padilla, Chuquisaca, some 400 km to the SE of Aiquile, it was my good fortune to spy and bag yet another relative a bit more abused with time.

This beautiful merostome had a great variety of associates: trilobites, brachiopods, molluscs, fish, and other phyla that have been found at the same stratigraphic level, the Francovichia biozone, in the Ida Formation of Chuquisaca and Cochabamba Departments, Bolivia. They suggest a fertile and hospitable environment during an incursion of cool seas into the heart of the ancient land mass of Gondwana.

The features of this belle of the ball have contributed substantially to our understanding of the life history of an unusual invertebrate. Its present-day representatives are leached for the antibiotic qualities of their blue blood. Their eye structure is studied for the insight it brings into human vision. She was chosen by the Bolivian Paleontological Society as the logo for the Latin American Congress it hosted in 1987. Does this strike you as a twice-told tale? Perhaps as a result this genus is the only South American fossil referred to and illustrated by Euan N. K. Clarkson in his book Invertebrate Paleontology and Evolution. From a hill in the middle of South America to a top-of-the line textbook, a Prima Donna's odyssey.