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Castle Bank is a
- 1 May 2023 - A Middle Ordovician Burgess Shale-type fauna from Castle Bank, Wales (UK)"> More careful examination has revealed an exceptional find among fossils. So far, 170 species have been found, among them more than 30 panarthropods and what resembles a marine relative of insects.
Being from the middle Ordovician, the fossils coincide with the Fossils found in Powys 'among world's most important'
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Castle Bank is a fossil
A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserve ...
deposit in Wales
Wales ( ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by the Irish Sea to the north and west, England to the England–Wales border, east, the Bristol Channel to the south, and the Celtic ...
that is 462 million years old and dates from the middle Ordovician
The Ordovician ( ) is a geologic period and System (geology), system, the second of six periods of the Paleozoic Era (geology), Era, and the second of twelve periods of the Phanerozoic Eon (geology), Eon. The Ordovician spans 41.6 million years f ...
period when Mid Wales
Mid Wales ( or simply ''Y Canolbarth'', meaning "the midlands"), or Central Wales, is a region of Wales, encompassing its midlands, in-between North Wales and South Wales. The Mid Wales Regional Committee of the Senedd covered the unitary autho ...
was covered by an ocean basin.
Fossil discoveries
When 2020COVID-19 lockdowns
During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of Non-pharmaceutical intervention (epidemiology), non-pharmaceutical interventions, particularly lockdowns (encompassing stay-at-home orders, curfews, quarantines, and similar socie ...
prevented Llandrindod residents and researchers for Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales
Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, branded as simply Amgueddfa Cymru (formerly the National Museums and Galleries of Wales and legally National Museum of Wales), is a Welsh Government sponsored body that comprises seven museums in Wales:
* N ...
, Joe Botting and Lucy Muir, from travelling, they reinvestigated a site they had discovered a decade earlier in a nearby sheep field. They had failed to find the site interesting at the time because it was just a 10-meter-wide quarry.Nature (journal)
''Nature'' is a British weekly scientific journal founded and based in London, England. As a multidisciplinary publication, ''Nature'' features Peer review, peer-reviewed research from a variety of academic disciplines, mainly in science and t ...Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event
The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE) was an evolutionary radiation of animal life throughout the Ordovician period, 40 million years after the Cambrian explosion, whereby the distinctive Cambrian fauna fizzled out to be replaced wi ...
. What makes these fossils differerent from those found in places such as the Cambrian
The Cambrian ( ) is the first geological period of the Paleozoic Era, and the Phanerozoic Eon. The Cambrian lasted 51.95 million years from the end of the preceding Ediacaran period 538.8 Ma (million years ago) to the beginning of the Ordov ...
fossils of the Burgess Shale
The Burgess Shale is a fossil-bearing deposit exposed in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia, Canada. It is famous for the exceptional preservation of the soft parts of its fossils. At old (middle Cambrian), it is one of the earliest fos ...
is their small size. Many forms that have been found in the Castle Bank deposit are of animals who had gone through a miniaturization trend when compared to Cambrian animals found among the Burgess Shale fossils, making the biota in the Castle Bank deposit more similar to modern faunas.
Their reduced size makes it difficult to identify some of the species, as most of these fossils are just between 1 and 5 mm in body size. Nonetheless, the fossils are exceptionally well preserved, with details as small as 10 μm often being visible, including tiny limbs, digestive systems, nerves, and filter-feeding tentacles. Such details also exist among certain Cambrian fossils, but have been absent from Ordovician finds that have been discovered to date./ref>
References
{{Burgess Shale type preservation Fossiliferous stratigraphic units in Wales Geologic formations of Wales Ordovician System of Europe