by A farm in England was the unlikely source of a Jurassic jackpot: a 183-million-year-old treasure trove of fossils. On the outskirts of Gloucestershire in the Cotswolds, beneath the ground that is currently trampled under the hooves of grazing cattle, researchers recently discovered the fossilized remains of fish, giant marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs, squid, insects and other ancient animals dating back to the early 20th century. XX. the Jurassic period (201.3 million to 145 million years ago).
Of the more than 180 fossils recorded during the excavation, one of the outstanding specimens was a three-dimensionally preserved fish head that belonged to pachycorm, an extinct genus of rayed fish. The fossil, which the researchers found embedded in a lump of hardened limestone sticking out of the clay, was exceptionally well preserved and contained soft tissue, including scales and an eye. The 3D nature of the specimen’s head and body pose was such that the researchers could not compare it to any other previous findings.
“The closest analogue we could think of was Big Mouth Billy Bass,” said Neville Hollingworth, a field geologist at the University of Birmingham who discovered the site with his wife, Sally, a fossil preparer and excavation coordinator. “The eyeball and orbit were well preserved. Usually with fossils, they’re lying flat. But in this case, it was preserved in more than one dimension, and it looks like the fish is jumping off the rock,” Hollingworth said. Living Science.
“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” added Sally Hollingworth. “You could see the scales, the skin, the spine – even the eyeball is still there.”
The vision so surprised the Hollingworths that they contacted ThinkSee3D, a company that creates digital 3D models of fossils, to create a (opens in new tab)interactive 3D image (opens in new tab) of the fish to help bring it to life and allow researchers to study it more closely.
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Most of the fossils that the Hollingworths and a team of scientists and experts unearthed were located behind the farm’s stable. (The farm is home to a herd of English longhorn — a British breed of beef cattle with long, curved horns — many of whom kept an eye on the dig.)
“It was a little unnerving to dig in when you’re being watched by a long-horned herd,” Sally Hollingworth told Live Science.
At the same time, this region of the UK was completely submerged by a shallow tropical sea, and the sediments there probably helped to preserve the fossils; Neville Hollingworth described the Jurassic layers as slightly horizontal, with layers of soft clays under a shell of harder limestone layers.
“When the fish died, they sank to the bottom of the sea,” said Dean Lomax, an expert on fossil marine reptiles, a visiting scientist at the University of Manchester, UK, and a member of the excavation team. “As with other fossils, minerals from the surrounding seafloor continually replaced the original structure of bones and teeth. In this case, the site shows that there was very little or no elimination, so they must have been quickly buried by the sediment. . As soon as they reached the bottom of the sea, they were covered and protected immediately.”
During the four-day excavation earlier this month, the eight-person team used an excavator to excavate 262 feet (80 meters) into the grassy edges of the farm, “pulling layers to reveal a tiny slice of geologic time,” Neville Hollingworth said. Several specimens dated to the Toarcian age (a Jurassic phase that occurred between 183 million and 174 million years ago) and included belemnites (extinct squid-like cephalopods), ammonites (extinct shelled cephalopods), bivalves and snails, in addition to fish. and other marine animals.
“It’s important that we can compare these fossils with other Toartian-era fossil sites, not just in the UK, but also across Europe and potentially America,” Lomax said. He pointed to the Strawberry Bank Lagerstätte, an early Jurassic site in southern England, as an example.
The group plans to continue studying the specimens and is working to publish the results. In the meantime, a selection of the fossils will be on display at the Park Museum in Stroud.
Originally published on Live Science.
