October Geology and GSA Today media ...(se marine plants. The exceptionally pres...)

Date:9/25/2007

se marine plants. The exceptionally preserved biota of the Eramosa Lagersttte lived in marginally marine to fully marine environments; those in the latter were associated with carbonate-secreting invertebrates such as brachiopods and corals, as well as burrowing organisms. It is the association of exceptionally preserved biota with the more commonly preserved shelly fauna and trace fossils that distinguishes the Eramosa Lagersttte from other shallow-marine Silurian Lagersttten, such as the Waukesha Lagersttte of Wisconsin. The Eramosa Lagersttte is not the product of exceptional preservation in an atypical environment, a bias claimed for many post-Cambrian Lagersttten, and may provide a more reliable, balanced measure of Silurian marine life than previously available.

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Exceptionally preserved Late Ordovician biotas from Manitoba, Canada
Graham A. Young, The Manitoba Museum, Geology and Paleontology, 190 Rupert Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 0N2, Canada; et al. Pages 883-886.

Much of our knowledge of life in the distant past has come from studies of those rare sites at which soft tissues such as skin and muscle are preserved. Very few such sites are known from the Ordovician Period of geological time (about 488 to 444 million years ago). Young et al. describe the fossils from two recently discovered Ordovician sites in Manitoba, Canada, where the rocks are formed from sediment deposited along and near ancient shorelines about 445 million years ago. Fossils in these rocks add significantly to our knowledge of life in the seas shortly before a major mass extinction. These fossils provide important clues about the anatomy and genealogy of several groups of organisms, including jellyfish, horseshoe crabs, eurypterids ("sea scorpions"), and seaweeds. Because they occur between the well-known Burgess Shaletype deposits of the Cambrian Period (which are more than 500 million years old) and younger Paleozoic soft-bodied fossils such as the
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Contact: Ann Cairns acairns@geosociety.org 303-357-1056 Geological Society of America Source:Eurekalert

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