In some animals, internal organs such as digestive systems and even nerves are preserved, together with the limbs of tiny arthropods and delicate filter-feeding tentacles. They range from arthropods like crustaceans and horseshoe crabs to various types of worms, sponges, starfish, and many, many more.
Many of the animals are very small, at only 1–3 mm long, but they preserve minute details. So far, well over 150 species have been recovered, almost all of them new. Lucy Muir, two authors of this study, near Llandrindod, central Wales. The remarkable new assemblage was discovered in 2020 by Dr. As a result, paleontologists know a lot about Cambrian marine life, but less about how it evolved in the periods immediately afterwards.Ĭastle Bank is from the middle of the succeeding Ordovician Period, some 462 million years ago, and rivals the best of the Cambrian deposits in diversity of fossils and extraordinary levels of preservation. However, almost none occur in post-Cambrian rocks.
Many of these sites occur in rocks from the Cambrian period (542–485 million years ago), when recognizable animal fossils first appeared. Among the best of these sites are Burgess Shale-type faunas, named after the classic Burgess Shale fossil-bearing deposit in Canada. The study is published in Nature Ecology & Evolution on May 1.Ĭastle Bank, in Powys, is one of the very rare sites where soft tissue and complete organisms are preserved, providing an unrivaled view of the evolution of life.
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