The first trilobite paleontologist in Canada was also one of five nuclear physicists from Italy who, in 1940, were granted a patent for the process leading to the atomic bomb

Pile of cigarette boxes containing Rasetti's trilobite specimens from Levis. GSC collections. Two top boxes contain types of Lauzonella planifrons and Lecanopyge? arenaria. (Photo by BDEC (c).)

In Canada virtually all paleontologists enter the profession with a doctoral degree in some aspect of fossil study, either in geology or biology. In the nineteenth century, however, many paleontologists started as amateurs who eventually gained professional status after years of work. Only rarely does a scientist from a distant field choose to become a paleontologist -- none, perhaps, from a field as paleontologically incongruous as Franco Rasetti's.

Rasetti was a well-connected physicist with a first-rate international reputation. In the 1920s and '30s he had worked closely with Enrico Fermi at the University of Rome in the infant field of nuclear physics. In fact, in 1936 he had written the first textbook in the field. Rasetti's interests, however, extended well beyond physics. By avocation, he was an accomplished naturalist with special interests in cave beetles and alpine flowers.

Eager to leave fascist Italy, Rasetti was recruited to come to Laval University in Quebec City in 1939 to start a Department of Physics. After he was settled in Canada, he looked around for an outlet for his considerable naturalist enthusiasm and energy. His colleagues in the Department of Geology mentioned that the rocks exposed in and around Quebec City contained fossils in some abundance; in particular, trilobites. Rasetti had no previous experience with fossils, but with characteristic drive and determination he set out to become a paleontologist of trilobites -- the only one in Canada at the time.

Franco Rasetti's drawing of the Middle Cambrian trilobite Albertella from the southern Rocky Mountains. (Prepared for the Trilobite Treatise (1959).)

Over a few years of assiduous collecting, Rasetti amassed a collection of thousands of Cambrian and Ordovician trilobite specimens from the Québec City area and Gaspé Peninsula. Each specimen was carefully trimmed of extraneous matrix and displayed in a metal cigarette box -- the flat 50s made by Canadian cigarette manufacturers in the 1940s with brand names such as Golden Flake, Sweet Caporals, Turret and Consols.

During the war years, while Fermi and his other physics friends from Italy were instrumental in ushering in the atomic age at the University of Chicago and later with the Manhattan Project, Rasetti, who did not want to get involved in military work, was honing his skills as a preparator and photographer of trilobites and publishing increasingly sophisticated papers on the taxonomy of Cambrian trilobites. His acceptance into the pantheon of master trilobite paleontologists came in the late '40s when he was invited to contribute to the trilobite volume of the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. Rasetti's sections in this volume are immediately recognizable by his boldly executed reconstuctions of trilobites.

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