A farm in England has unearthed 183 million-year-old fossils from the Jurassic period that are very well preserved
One of the most impressive discoveries was a three-dimensionally preserved fish head from a Jurassic fish species called Pachycormus.
On the outskirts of Gloucestershire in the Cotswolds, beneath soil crushed under the hooves of grazing cattle, researchers have recently unearthed fossilized fish remains, giant marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs, squid, insects and other ancient animals dating to the early Jurassic period (201.3 million to 145 million years ago).
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Of the more than 180 fossils recorded during the excavation, one of the standout specimens was a three-dimensionally preserved fish head from Pachycormus, an extinct genus of ray-finned fish. The fossil, which the researchers found embedded in a hardened limestone nodule emerging from the clay, was extremely well preserved and contained scales and soft tissues, including an eye. The three-dimensional nature of the pose of the specimen’s head and body was such that the researchers could not compare it to any previous find.
“The closest analogy we could think of was Big Mouth Billy Bass,” says Neville Hollingworth, a field geologist from the University of Birmingham who explored the site with his wife Sally, the excavation coordinator. “The eyeball and socket are well preserved. Usually, in fossils, they’re flat. But in this case, it’s preserved in more than one dimension, and the fish seems to be popping out of the rock.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this before, you could see the scales, the skin, the spine – even the eyeball is there,” says Sally Hollingworth.
The sight so astonished the Hollingworths that they contacted ThinkSee3D, a company that creates digital 3D fossil models, to help bring the fish to life and allow researchers to study it more closely.
Most of the fossils uncovered by the Hollingworths and a team of scientists and experts were located behind the farm’s barn. (The farm is home to a herd of English longhorns, a breed of British cattle with long, curved horns, many of which closely followed the excavation). “It was a bit nerve-wracking to dig while being watched by a herd of longhorns,” says Sally Hollingworth.
Once upon a time, this part of the UK was completely submerged by a shallow, tropical sea, and the sediments there probably helped preserve the fossils. Neville Hollingworth describes Jurassic deposits as a slightly horizontal layer of soft clay layers under a crust of harder limestone beds.
“When the fish died, they sank to the bottom of the sea,” says fossil marine reptile expert Dean Lomax, a visiting scientist at the University of Manchester and a member of the excavation group. “As with other fossils, minerals from the surrounding seabed continually replaced the original structure of the bones and teeth. In this case, the site suggests there was little or no scavenging, so they must have been quickly buried by the sediment. As soon as they hit the seabed they are covered over and immediately preserved.”
During the four-day excavation earlier this month, the eight-person team used a pickaxe to dig 80 meters into the grassy shores of the farm, removing layers to reveal a small geologic time period.
Several specimens dating to the Toarcian (a phase of the Jurassic period that occurred between 183 million and 174 million years ago) were unearthed, including belemnites (extinct squid-like cephalopods), ammonites (extinct crustacean cephalopods), bivalves and snails, in addition to fish and other marine animals.
“It’s important that we can compare these fossils with other Toarcian-age fossil sites, not only in the UK, but also in Europe and potentially America,” says Lomax. Lomax points to the Strawberry Bank Lagerstätte, an early Jurassic site in southern England, as one such example.
The group plans to continue studying the samples and is working to publish the findings. In the meantime, a selection of the fossils will be on display at the Museum in the Park in Stroud.
Live Science. July 29, 2022.
