A view of the famous, long-abandoned Vaughn Quarry in the Marble Mountains, near the classic trilobite quarry. For many years high-grade marble from early Cambrian times, some 525 million years old, was commercially mined here. Please note that this photograph was taken long before the Marble Mountains became part of a national monument.

The Marble Mountains trilobite locality presently lies within Mojave Trails National Monument (officially authorized and established on February 12, 2016), where the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) continues to allow the casual collection of reasonable amounts of common invertebrate fossils--a designation that here includes trilobites; for fossil sites situated on private property, visitors must secure explicit permission from the land owners.