They discovered a “Jurassic Pompeii”, a cemetery of alien-looking sea creatures dating back 167 million years ago.

Paleontologists have discovered an immense cemetery of perfectly preserved Jurassic fossils with a particular “extraterrestrial” aspect in the Cotswolds region, in the south-west of England (United Kingdom).

This “Jurassic Pompeii” As it was called by its discoverers for the quantity of fossils and the state of preservation of the specimens, it can give us an incomparable view of the forms of life present in ancient times.

Imagine for a moment that it is the Middle Jurassic and you are standing next to an estuary that flows into a warm, shallow sea. Marine life is flourishing. Dinosaurs roam the islands around you, including the herbivorous cetiosaurus (which means whale lizard) and the carnivorous megalosaurus (which means large lizard). Conifers predominate.

Looking into the water you notice that the bottom of the sea is full of animals. Starfish, sea urchins and sea cucumbers move around the feathery arms of water lilies and feathery stars, gently swaying with the current. Some seek food by floating in moving water, others seek food in the sediments of the seabed or seek to capture other creatures.

It could have been a peaceful scene, but we know the peace was interrupted by a catastrophic event.. An event so sudden and dramatic that it drowned everything at the bottom of the sea with a thick layer of mud.

Trapped in the mud, these animals are lost in time, up to 167.1 million years later, when the entire seabed, beautifully preserved as it was tens of millions of years ago, was discovered in the North Cotswolds Quarry.

Researchers at the Natural History Museum in London have teamed up with local experts to dig the quarry, uncovering extraordinary amounts of fossils in the muddy depths in the process.

“What we find on this site are the best preserved sea urchins, starfish, water lilies and feathered stars that I have seen in Britain. It is comparable to some of the best sea urchin sites. and fossil starfish in the world ”, explains Dr Tim Ewin, senior curator of the museum.

Among the fossils found, the team found more than 1,000 specimens of crinoids, a species of marine life that includes feathered stars and water lilies. Their fossils are rare because the soft tissues that hold their skeletal plates together decay quickly after death and rarely fossilize.

However, researchers have found numerous crinoid fossils with their entire bodies preserved in the quarry. To put this in perspective, there are currently only 25 incomplete specimens of fossil feathered stars in the Museum’s 200-year-old collection.

Dr Ewin says feathered stars began to diversify during the Middle Jurassic, having appeared only 30 million years earlier, at the start of the Jurassic Period.

While there may be a few new species among these fossils, Dr Ewin says he’s equally delighted to have a large collection of individuals of the same species.

“The extraordinary number of these fossils will allow us to see how these individuals grew, as we can see at all stages of their life, from young to adulthood”, explains the scientist.

Other rare fossils in the mix are the mouthparts of a sea cucumber and possibly a new species of British star.

“These fossils are beautifully preserved”Ewin said, adding, “No complete British star fossils are known from other sites of the same age in Britain.”

This new discovery is very exciting for scientists and paleontologists who will spend the next few years studying and classifying these fossils in the hope that through them we will be able to better understand this period of prehistory and the evolutionary changes that have occurred during of it.

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