Holochroal eyes are

compound eyes A compound eye is a visual organ found in arthropods such as insects and crustaceans. It may consist of thousands of ommatidia, which are tiny independent photoreception units that consist of a cornea, lens, and photoreceptor cells which distin ...

with many tiny lenses (sometimes more than 15,000, each 30-100μm, rarely larger). They are the oldest and most common type of

trilobite Trilobites (; meaning "three lobes") are extinct marine arthropods that form the class Trilobita. Trilobites form one of the earliest-known groups of arthropods. The first appearance of trilobites in the fossil record defines the base of the At ...

eye, and found in all orders of

from the Cambrian to the Permian periods. Lenses (composed of

calcite Calcite is a Carbonate minerals, carbonate mineral and the most stable Polymorphism (materials science), polymorph of calcium carbonate (CaCO3). It is a very common mineral, particularly as a component of limestone. Calcite defines hardness 3 on ...

) covered a curved, kidney-shaped visual surface in a

hexagonal close packing In geometry, close-packing of equal spheres is a dense arrangement of congruent spheres in an infinite, regular arrangement (or lattice). Carl Friedrich Gauss proved that the highest average density – that is, the greatest fraction of space occu ...

system, with a single corneal membrane covering all lenses. Unlike in schizochroal eyes, adjacent lenses were in direct contact with one another. Lens shape generally depended on cuticle thickness. The lenses of trilobites with thin cuticles were thin and biconvex, whereas those with thick cuticles had thick lenses, which in extreme cases, could be thick columns with the outer surface flattened and the inner surface hemispherical. Regardless of lens thickness, however, the point at which light was focused was roughly the same distance below the lens.

References

Eye Animal anatomy {{trilobite-stub