Discovered the fossil remains of an entire marine ecosystem of 462 million years ago, there are at least 170 species of worms, starfish, crustaceans and arthropods hitherto unknown. The research group led by by Joseph Botting, the National Museum of Wales and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The study is published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
The large deposit discovered in the midst of the pandemic in present-day Wales has a series of characteristics for which it has been defined as a deposit of the Burgess Shale type, from the name of the fossil site discovered in Canada at the beginning of the 1900s, dating back to the Cambrian period. in which they manage to keep a good part of the soft tissues of the trapped animals in the clay.
The new site, found at Castle Bank, has preserved for 462 million years a real marine ecosystem dating back to a little-known period, the so-called Middle Ordovician, in which many small marine organisms were found, even as small as 1 millimeter . The discovery allows us to take an unprecedented look at the fauna that inhabited the seas before the great mass extinction that occurred shortly after, probably due to a rapid cooling of the world’s climate or to the violent bombardment of gamma rays due to a nearby supernova.
The newly discovered fauna consists of at least 170 species, in particular worms, starfish, crustaceans and arthropods including some of the enigmatic creatures already present in the Cambrian period, such as the 5-eyed Opabinia and some megacheiri, which survived in the Ordovician and then extinct
Source: Ansa
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