A farm in England was the unlikely source of a Jurassic bounty: a treasure trove of 183-million-year-old fossils. On the outskirts of Gloucestershire in the Cotswolds, beneath soil now trampled under the hooves of cattle, researchers recently discovered fossilized remains of giant fish and marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs, squid, insects and other ancient animals dating from the early the Jurassic period (201.3 million to 145 million years ago).
Among the more than 180 fossils recorded during the excavation, one remarkable specimen is a preserved three-dimensional head of a fish belonging to Pachycormus, an extinct genus of ray-finned fish. The fossil, which the researchers found embedded in a nodule of hardened limestone outside the clay, was very well preserved and contained soft tissue, including scales and an eye. The three-dimensional nature of the head and body position of the specimen was such that the researchers could not compare it to other previous discoveries.
“The closest we can think of is Bigmouth Billy Bass,” said Neville Hollingworth, a field geologist at the University of Birmingham who discovered the site with his wife, Sally, a fossil preparator and coordinator. “The eyeball and orbit are well preserved,” Hollingworth said. “Usually in fossils they lie flat. But in this case, they are preserved in more than one dimension, and the fish appears to be jumping off the cliff. Live science.
The scales and eyes of the fish are part of the soft tissues preserved for more than 180 million years. (Photo: Dean Lomax)
“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” added Sally Hollingworth. “You can see the scales, the skin, the spine – even the eyeball is still there.”
The scene so startled the Hollingworths that they contacted ThinkSee3D, a company that produces digital 3D models of fossils, to create (Opens in new tab)3D interactive image (Opens in a new tab) of fish to help bring them back to life and allow researchers to study them more closely.
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Most of the fossils found by Hollingworth and a team of scientists and specialists were found behind the farm’s cowshed. (The farm is home to a herd of English Longhorns—a British breed of long-horned, curvy cows—many of whom keep a close eye on the dig.)
“It was a bit annoying to dig with a herd of longhorns watching you,” Sally Hollingworth told Live Science.
At one time this area of the UK was completely submerged by a shallow tropical sea and it is likely that the sediments there helped preserve the fossils; Neville Hollingworth describes the Jurassic strata as slightly horizontal, with layers of fine clay under a crust of stronger limestone layers.
“When the fish died, it sank to the sea floor,” said marine fossil reptile specialist Dean Lomax, a visiting scientist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and a member of the excavation team. “As with other fossils, minerals from the ocean floor are constantly replacing the original bone and tooth structure. In this case, the site indicates that there was very little or no excrement, so they would have to be buried quickly by the sediments, and once they reached the bottom, the sea was immediately covered and protected.
During their four-day drilling earlier this month, Neville Hollingworth said the eight-man team used an excavator to dig 262ft (80m) through the grassland banks “to pull the strata back to expose a small since geological time.” A number of different specimens date from the Taurasian period (a phase of the Jurassic period that occurred between 183 million and 174 million years ago) and include belemnites (extinct cephalopods), ammonites (extinct cephalopods), bivalves and snails, in addition to fish and other marine animals .
“It is important to be able to compare these fossils with other fossil sites from the Tuarsi period, not only in the UK but also across Europe and possibly places in the Americas,” Lomax said. He cites the Strawberry Bank Lagerstätte, an Early Jurassic site in southern England, as an example.
The group plans to continue studying the samples and is working to publish the results. Meanwhile, a selection of the museum’s fossils will be on display in Stroud’s garden.
Originally published on Live Science.
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