Abstract
Preservation of a fragment of an arthropod from starved trough sediments of the Bøggild Fjord Formation (Ordovician, Floian) of Johannes V. Jensen Land in north Peary Land, North Greenland, recalls that of the lower Cambrian Sirius Passet Lagerstätte of extreme north-west Peary Land and may suggest a second locality for exceptional preservation in North Greenland. A prominent petaloid pattern on the tergopleurae reflects impression onto the internal mould of terrace lines from the cuticle exterior. The arthropod is associated with poorly preserved sponges and a depauperate assemblage of organic-walled microfossils. It is tentatively compared to Mollisonia, originally described from the Burgess Shale Lagerstätte (middle Cambrian, Miaolingian Series) of Canada.
Highlights
The tremendous diversification of highly organised life at the beginning of the Phanerozoic is witnessed in the Cambrian by a number of localities yielding exceptionally preserved fossils, the Konservat-Lagerstätten of Seilacher (1970)
Foremost amongst these is the classic Burgess Shale Lagerstätte from the middle Cambrian (Miaolingian Series) of British Columbia, Canada (Briggs et al 1994), but its diversity is exceeded by the early Cambrian (Series 2) Qingjiang Lagerstätte (Fu et al 2019) and the Chengjiang Lagerstätte (Hou et al 2017) of South China, the latter just one of numerous Cambrian Lagerstätten analysed by Holmes et al (2018)
The specimen is similar in terms of its preservation to some of the arthropods described from the Sirius Passet Lagerstätte
Summary
The tremendous diversification of highly organised life at the beginning of the Phanerozoic is witnessed in the Cambrian by a number of localities yielding exceptionally preserved fossils, the Konservat-Lagerstätten of Seilacher (1970). The specimen is similar in terms of its preservation to some of the arthropods described from the Sirius Passet Lagerstätte. The unique specimen was collected from strata of the Bøggild Fjord Formation, the uppermost formation of a starved trough succession represented by the Vølvedal Group in southern Johannes V. The lack of the head shield prevents accurate identification of the Rypely specimen, but the thorax allows speculative comparison to that of Mollisonia Walcott, 1912, a relatively rare arthropod originally described from the middle Cambrian (Miaolingian Series) Burgess Shale Lagerstätte of British Columbia (Walcott 1912). GGU sample 217703, Bøggild Fjord Formation, southern Johannes V. The localities at Sirius Passet and Rypely are similar in preserving starved siliciclastic successions that accumulated offshore from the northern margin of the carbonate-dominated shelf (Higgins et al 1991a, b). GGU prefix—indicates a sample of Grønlands Geologiske Undersøgelse (Geological Survey of Greenland), a part of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), Copenhagen, Denmark; MGUH prefix—denotes a specimen deposited in the type collection of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen; USNM prefix—denotes a specimen deposited in the US National Museum of Natural History, Washington D.C
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