Well preserved Jurassic fish fossils found on UK farm
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Jurassic fossil fish more than 180 million years old was found in the Gloucestershire cattle field in the United Kingdom.
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The 3D fossil of a Jurassic fish known as a Pachycormus was one of more than 180 fossils found on a farm in the UK. (Photo credit: Courtesy Sally and Neville Hollingworth)
Researchers uncovered the fossilized remains of fish, giant marine reptiles, insects, squids, and other ancient animals dating to the early phase of the Jurassic period on the outskirts of Gloucestershire in the Cotswolds, beneath the soil that is presently trampled under the hooves of grazing cattle.
During the dig, one of the standout specimens logged was a 3D preserved fish head that belonged to an extinct genus of ray-finned fishes called Pachycormus. It was found embedded in a hardened limestone nodule standing out of the clay and was well preserved in an exceptional manner, containing soft tissues and including scales and an eye. The researchers couldn't compare it to any other previous find, due to the nature of the pose of the specimen's head and body.
A field geologist with the University of Birmingham who discovered the site, Neville Hollingworth, said, "The closest analogue we could think of was Big Mouth Billy Bass."
"The eyeball and socket were well preserved. Usually, with fossils, they're lying flat. But in this case, it was preserved in more than one dimension, and it looks like the fish is leaping out of the rock," Hollingworth told Live Science.
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A fish's scales and eyes were some of the soft tissues preserved for more than 180 million years. (Image credit: Dean Lomax)
"I've never seen anything like it before," Sally Hollingworth, his wife, who is a fossil preparator and the dig’s coordinator added. "You could see the scales, skin, spine — even its eyeball is still there."
The Hollingworths contacted ThinkSee3D, a company that creates digital 3D models of fossils, to create an interactive 3D image of the fish to help bring it to life and allow researchers to closely carry out a study on it.
Most of the fossils the Hollingworths and a team of specialists and scientists unearthed were found behind the farm's cowshed. "It was a bit unnerving digging when you're being watched by a herd of longhorn," Sally Hollingworth told Live Science.
This region of the United Kingdom was at one time totally submerged by a shallow, tropical sea, and the existing sediments probably contributed to preserving the fossils; Neville Hollingworth described the Jurassic beds as slightly horizontal, with layers of soft clays under a shell of harder limestone beds.
"When the fish died, they sank to the bottom of the seabed," noted fossil marine reptile specialist Dean Lomax, a member of the excavation team and a visiting scientist at the University of Manchester in the UK.
"As with other fossils, the minerals from the surrounding seabed continually replaced the original structure of the bones and teeth. In this case, the site shows that there was very little to no scavenging, so they must've been rapidly buried by the sediment. As soon as they hit the seabed, they were covered over and protected immediately."
The digging took four days earlier this month, and the members used a digger to excavate 262 feet (80 meters) across the farm's grassy banks, "pulling back layers to reveal a small slice of geological time," Neville Hollingworth said.
A number of various specimens dated to the Toarcian age and included ammonites, belemnites, snails, and bivalves, as well as fish and other marine animals.
"It's important that we can compare these fossils with other Toarcian age fossil sites, not only in the UK but also across Europe and potentially sites in America," Lomax said, pointing to Strawberry Bank Lagerstätte, an early Jurassic site in southern England, as one example.
The group of eight who worked on this treasure trove plans to continue studying the specimens and publish the findings. In the meantime, a collection of the fossils will be put on display at the Museum in the Park in Stroud.
Back in January, workers at a reserve made a lifetime discovery while on routine maintenance of a lagoon when they found a "sea dragon".
The gigantic fossilized remains of an ichthyosaur have been found in Rutland Water Nature Reserve in the East Midlands, UK.
According to researchers, this is one of the most important discoveries in the UK, since it represents the biggest and most complete skeleton of its kind found to date, and it dates back to 180 million years.
