BRANDON SPECKTOR, LIVE SCIENCE
30 JULY 2021
Paleontologists have uncovered an enormous fossil graveyard of squiggly, alien-like Jurassic sea creatures beneath a limestone quarry in the UK s Cotswolds region.
The fossil find includes perhaps tens of thousands of marine invertebrates called echinoderms - meaning hedgehog skin in Greek, and including the ancient ancestors of modern starfish, sea cucumbers, sea urchins and frilly-limbed sea lilies - immaculately preserved at all stages of their life cycles, the researchers said in a statement.
But right when things were booming, the thriving seabed community met a cataclysmic end; a mysterious catastrophe - perhaps a mudslide triggered by an earthquake - suffocated and entombed the animals for 167 million years.
Enormous graveyard of alien-like sea creatures discovered at Jurassic Pompeii in central UK
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