Imagine this: It’s 1984, and two amateur paleontologists are digging in a quarry near Waukesha when they discover what ultimately turns out to be about 2,000 invertebrate fossils — things like soft-bodied worms and shelled creatures like snails and tiny crustaceans, essentially entombed. They are an astonishing 430 million years old and many have never been seen before. Forty years later, as researchers are still identifying and classifying new species from the rare collection, one of them names a little trilobite after you. “It still hasn’t sunk in. It is such a huge, huge honor,” says Carrie Eaton, who is...