![]() Researchers have found similarly stunning Cambrian fossil sites around the world.īut beautifully maintained animals are much rarer in the succeeding Ordovician period. The exquisite preservation of Castle Bank’s fossils resembles that uncovered from the Burgess Shale, the iconic, 500-million-year-old Cambrian deposit in the Canadian Rockies that has yielded the remains of some of the oldest complex animals on Earth. Shown here are fossils of: (A) a probable priapulid, or a marine worm, showing a central gut and (B) a tubicolous problematic organism, which is a soft-bodied creature that lives in a tube. Many of these evolutionary oddballs were delicately etched into the ash-colored stone, where soft-body features such as gills, digestive tracts, optic nerves and neural tissue-which rarely fossilize-were easily visible. There was also an animal reminiscent of Opabinia, a weird wonder of the Cambrian that had five eyes and a trunklike proboscis. In addition to sponges and worms were trilobites, arthropods sporting grasping appendages and a six-legged animal that looked remarkably similar to a primitive insect that did not appear until millions of years later. Over several months the paleontologists discovered the fossils of around 170 different species that likely inhabited the rocky slope along a subsiding volcano. “You split them open, and after 30 seconds, they just magically appear,” Botting says. ![]() Like a developing photograph, the fossils became apparent several seconds after the paleontologists cracked open the rocks. Within a two-meter-thick band of rock, Botting and Muir found traces of a thriving ecosystem. They quickly realized they were just scratching the site’s surface. That fossil, which is only 3.5 mm tall and resembles a spindly alien spacecraft, looked unlike anything either paleontologist had ever seen. “And of course, that is the day that I first found a little tube with tentacles sticking out,” he recalls. ![]() One day Botting headed down to the quarry to search for more sponges. But they failed to find traces of anything other than sponges.ĭuring the COVID lockdown in 2020, they began describing the local suite of sponges as a pandemic project. For years Muir and Botting, who are honorary research fellows at Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales, returned to the site to look for more fossils. The paleontologist couple initially discovered the deposit in 2013, when they spotted sponge fossils in a small quarry surrounded by sheep pasture. Also in the fossil trove are tiny enigmatic holdovers from the preceding Cambrian explosion, a period that started about 540 million years ago, when a burst of diverse life-forms emerged. In a new study published online on May 1 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, the duo and their colleagues in England, Sweden and China describe the site’s ancient inhabitants, most of which are just a couple of millimeters long and include nozzle-mouthed worms, horseshoe crabs, starfish and early barnacles. At the time the aquatic creatures were alive, this area was a rocky sea shelf fringing a volcanic island. Paleontologists Lucy Muir and Joseph Botting discovered the pint-sized fossil trove within walking distance from their home at Castle Bank Quarry in Central Wales. Hidden inside a rocky outcrop near a flock of grazing sheep, a miniature world of marine creatures-whose guts, eyes and even brains remain visible after some 462 million years-has been uncovered by researchers.
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