Life of the Oceans - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 156

abundance of shelly fossils appeared in the rock record. It produced
ecosystems that were resilient: ecosystems that could only collapse as
a result of events of singular ferocity, such as massive climate change,
giant asteroid impacts, and perhaps, much later, the evolution of
large-brained apes.
Resilient Life
Once the ocean ecosystem had formed its complex economy, cross-
linking those species that produced and those that consumed, it
became resilient. These ecosystems now possessed hundreds or thou-
sands of species, so the loss of a few by extinction mattered little. The
fossil record usually pays scant justice to the burgeoning biological
extravagance of these oceans, showing only the skeletal remains of
the head of a trilobite here, or scattered brachiopod shells there. Just
occasionally, more remarkable fossil discoveries allow us to dive
beneath the waves of these ancient seas, to witness first-hand the
remarkable complexity of these newly emerged ecosystems.
One such fossil locality lies near to the small Herefordshire town of
Kington, close to the border with Wales. It is called the 'Herefordshire
Lagerstätte'. Lagerstätte is a German word that translates as 'a place of
storage'. In palaeontology, it means a site with extraordinary fossils.
The Herefordshire Lagerstätte is, indeed, a storehouse for some of the
most remarkable fossils ever discovered. They date from the Silurian
Period, just after the phenomenon that was GOBE. It represents an
ocean biosphere in full bloom.
It was Bob King, self-trained mineralogist and erstwhile curator of
geology at Leicester University, who first picked up the tennis ball-
sized nodules from the quarry near Kington. He had been rooting for
minerals in the quarry spoil. Bob picked up the nodules and thought
them interesting enough to bring back to the Leicester collections.
What he originally saw in them no one is quite sure, and they lay