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.