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Ordovician faunas of Burgess Shale type
Diverse soft-bodied Burgess Shale-like creatures may have persisted beyond the Cambrian period, according to a new study entitled 'Ordovician faunas of Burgess Shale type.' It is published in the most recent issue (13 May 2010) of the journal Nature.
The Burgess Shale of British Columbia is famous for having yielded fossils of soft-bodied creatures from the Middle Cambrian, offering a window onto early animal life in the sea. Similar faunas have been found in localities as far apart as China and Greenland, but it's unclear whether these creatures died out before the end of the Cambrian. The disappearance of faunas of Burgess Shale type decreases the stratigraphic record of a number of iconic Cambrian taxa. One possible explanation for this loss is a major extinction, but more probably it reflects the absence of preservation of similar soft-bodied faunas in later periods.
Peter Van Roy of the Department of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University and colleagues describe numerous, diverse soft-bodied assemblages found in in the Lower and Upper Fezouata Formations (Lower Ordovician) of southeastern Morocco.
The finds indicate that poor preservation rather than mass extinction is the reason for the apparent disappearance of Burgess Shale-type fauna from the post-Cambrian fossil record.
The Fezouata biota provides a link between the Burgess Shale communities and the early stages of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event.
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