Abstract
Our perception of biodiversity in the geological past is incomplete and biased because most organisms did not have mineralized skeletons and therefore had little chance of fossilization. This especially refers to shallow-water marine environments, rarely represented by localities with exceptional preservation of fossil material (known as taphonomic windows or Konservat-Lagerstätten). Such extraordinary “windows” may markedly broaden our knowledge of biodiversity of the past. Here, we show a review of the invertebrate fossils from recently discovered locality in the Lower Ordovician Fenxiang Formation of Hubei Province in southern China revealing exceptional preservation of soft tissues. The fauna, generally of shallow-water aspect, contains linguloid brachiopods with a remarkably preserved pedicle, the oldest traces of nematode life activities, the oldest reliable record of hydroids, the first fossil antipatharian corals, a pyritized colonial organism of unknown affinity, supposed arthropod appendages, probable phosphatized scalidophoran worm embryo and other fossils. Our discovery supports the opinion that the famous soft-bodied preservation of Burgess Shale- or Chengjiang-type did not vanish from the fossil record in post-Cambrian times. The new finding represents a prelude to the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event and provides evidence for calibration of molecular clock of several invertebrate lineages.
Highlights
The classic examples of taphonomic windows that have been essential for exploring the earliest Paleozoic biodiversity and phylogenetic metazoan differentiation are the Early Cambrian Chengjiang (Yunnan Province, China) and the Mid-Cambrian Burgess Shale (British Columbia, Canada) soft-bodied biotas [1,2,3]
The preliminary results of our research briefly reviewed in this paper indicate that more extensive paleontological works on the Fenxiang Formation may significantly change the current picture of the Ordovician world
Discovery of new soft-bodied and skeletonized fossils in the Early Ordovician of China contributes new important data on the prelude of one of the greatest-ever diversifications of life known as the GOBE which was initiated in the late Early Ordovician
Summary
The classic examples of taphonomic windows that have been essential for exploring the earliest Paleozoic biodiversity and phylogenetic metazoan differentiation are the Early Cambrian Chengjiang (Yunnan Province, China) and the Mid-Cambrian Burgess Shale (British Columbia, Canada) soft-bodied biotas [1,2,3]. Ordovician faunas with preserved soft parts are still remarkably rare globally [5, 7], they indicate that the BST soft-bodied faunas, on one hand, and specific taphonomic conditions, on the other, persisted sporadically beyond the Cambrian [8] Examples of such remarkable preservation in the Ordovician are soft-bodied or lightly sclerotized assemblages in the Tremadocian (Early Ordovician) Fezouata Formation in Morocco [4], the Late Ordovician of New York State (Beecher’s Trilobite Bed) [5], the Late Ordovician of Manitoba [6] and Llanfawr Mudstone of Wales [7], Middle Ordovician Winneshiek Lagerstatte in northeast Iowa [9], and the Hirnantian (Late Ordovician) Soom Shale of South Africa [10] (Fig. 1). We present a short overview of this fauna including both recently reported or hitherto undescribed fossils
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