The misfortune that struck this place 167 ma BP has delivered to him an extraordinary collection of fossil animals in what is unquestionably one of the most important Jurassic dig sites ever discovered in the UK. The quantities involved are astonishing. 10Ks of these animals that scientists collectively call “the echinoderms”. It’s a great name, derived from the Greek for “hedgehog”, or “spiny”, “skin”. What is a sea urchin, if not an “underwater hedgehog”? But it’s also the quality of the preservation that’s jaw-dropping. Lean in close to a slab of rock that’s just been cleaned up and you’ll observe what, at first sight, reminds you of a plate of noodles. It is in fact a great mass of fossil arms from who knows how many sea lilies. You can clearly discern the individual calcite plates, or ossicles, that made up the skeletal frames of these animals when they were alive. What’s more, the specimens are fully articulated. Everything is captured in 3 dimensions.

2023-05-13: And a similar site also in the UK

Fossils from 462 ma BP recently discovered in a quarry, called Castle Bank in central Wales reveal some Cambrian life forms held on for millions of years longer than paleontologists had thought before going extinct, and certain classes of modern animals got their starts earlier than expected. The quarry also holds strange creatures thought to have arisen and vanished during the Cambrian period, such as opabiniids, which had five eyes and a long proboscis, and scaly slugs called wiwaxiids. Newcomers spotted in the deposits include modern families of glass sponges and a group of crustaceans called horseshoe shrimp, which were thought to have arisen much later. The researchers have found 170 species. “There is every reason to expect that the diversity of the fauna will continue to climb as the authors continue their research”. But even the currently documented diversity emphasizes the underappreciated importance of this time, called the Ordovician, which set the stage for the world’s current biodiversity. The Welsh quarry could definitely be as famous as the Burgess Shale.

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