![]() It turned out that the answer had been there all along, adorning the shale in deep folds like elephant skin. “But what we have here is very different.” In a recent study, Wendruff attempted to answer this question by examining thousands of Waukesha fossils. “Often, there’s this cookie-cutter definition of rapid burial,” Wendruff says. Read: Oops, the oldest fossils ever found might be just rocksįor decades, this incredible preservation of soft tissue stumped scientists. ![]() “To be able to look at this specimen of a leech and actually see the segmented rings and the mouth structure preserved hundreds of millions of years ago is mind-blowing,” says Carrie Eaton, the Geology Museum’s curator. Although most creatures found in the formation lack easily fossilized hard tissue, they appear on the rock in exquisite detail: Several trilobites sport preserved guts, while some tiny crustaceans no bigger than Altoids possess 440-million-year-old hearts. “There’s a lot of really important events that are occurring in the Silurian, and we actually get to see some of these things with the Waukesha” fossils, says Andrew Wendruff, a paleontologist at Ohio’s Otterbein University.Īnd what a glimpse those Waukesha fossils provide. These fossils offer an unparalleled glimpse into the Silurian, a geological period during which Earth’s climate stabilized, plants conquered land, and fish developed jaws. They donated their find to the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum, where thousands of Waukesha specimens now fill drawer after drawer. Knowing they had found something special, Gunderson and Meyer frantically shaved off slabs of the fossil-bearing rock, preventing them from being pulverized in the pursuit of limestone. Soft tissue, such as skin and organs, tends to be the first thing to decay after death. After splitting open rocks from a thin layer known as the Brandon Bridge Formation, they uncovered ultrarare fossilized soft tissue. The amateur paleontologists Jerry Gunderson and Ron Meyer discovered these fossils at a Waukesha quarry in 1984. There were even conodonts-eel-like creatures sporting a shadow of a spine, making them some of our earliest relatives. But look closer, and this primeval ocean takes on a familiar feel: Here, some of the first scorpions scuttled alongside the earliest leeches. ![]() ![]() A hundred million years removed from the Cambrian explosion, when the diversity of life skyrocketed, this area teemed with alien creatures like spiny worms and armored trilobites. Where malls and breweries now stand was a shallow, tropical sea resembling a Bahamian cay.
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