Supervisors: Prof. Mark Purnell (Leicester), Dr. Sarah Gabbott (Leicester), and Prof. Peter von Bitter (Royal Ontario Museum)

About my project

There is a distinct lack of Silurian Lagerstätten in the fossil record. However, of late, they are being increasingly reported; particularly from the North America continent. Among these new Silurian Lagerstätten is the Eramosa formation of the Bruce Penninsula, in Ontario, Canada, which preserves a wealth of soft bodied organisms, including phyllocarid crustaceans, eurypterids and other invertebrates. However, uniquely for such a deposit, there is also a normal shelly marine fauna preserved alongside these soft body fossils. This suggests that the environment that the fossils lived in may not have been so unusual, unlike the rather toxic environments inferred for most lagerstätten, and may therefore represent a much less biased view of Silurian ecosystems than we are currently familiar with.

Research

The deposit contains many specimens that are yet to be described, which will be a major focus of mine. Firstly, I am looking at the conodont assemblage, which is thought to be one of the most abundant and diverse assemblage of articulated conodonts known (it more than quadruples the number previously known from the Silurian), which also preserve dark, carbonized eyespots (see the image below). I am also looking at the expansive phyllocarid assemblage.

My primary goal is to understand the unique taphonomy of this deposit, and apply these insights to other lagerstätten round the world. We can then use the Eramosa to underline the nature of bias within lagerstätten as a whole.

When looking at the morphology of fossils from lagerstätten such as these, we need to be able to identify what aspects have been lost through the processes of decay and through taphonomic bias. So, currently, I am undertaking some experimental studies on the decay of some modern animals, as an analogy for fossils that we see in the fossil record.

Links

At Leicester...

• Paleobiology Group at Leicester
  

• Mark Purnell

• Sarah Gabbott
  

Personal

• Please see my blog at Science 2.0