When I first
read about fossils found in ‘Lagerstatte’, I thought it was the name of a place
or region, probably in Germany, that had a plethora of fossils residing there.
Everything I assumed was pretty correct, except it’s not a place or region, it is a type
of place. It turns out that in German, ‘lager’ means ‘storage’ and ‘statte’
means ‘place’. What this word indicates these days is a particular type of sedimentary deposit with
fossils of exceptional preservation. I mean, sometimes even the soft tissue has
been preserved, which is pretty darned exceptional.
This may have
happened when a carcass was buried in an anoxic (without oxygen) environment
with minimal bacteria, which would have delayed the decomposition of all
biological features until a durable impression was created in the surrounding
mud or whatever.
There are 2
types of Lagerstatte beds. The concentration type holds a lot of disarticulated
hard parts, such as bones. Invariably, the accumulation of bones without a lot
of other sediment takes time, so this type displays a large time period.
The 2nd type is
conservation Lagerstatte, which hold exceptional preservation of fossilized
organism or traces. Each of these
sites can provide answers to important moment in the evolution and history of
life. It’s like a snapshot, allowing the viewer to see the entire animal, even
what the skin was like. Or the texture of a feather or shape of a footprint, in
the case of a trace.
My first thought
after reading about lagerstatte was that the now-fossilized creature must have
fallen into water or mud, but there is oxygen in water (and thus in mud also),
so that would not necessarily provide an anoxic condition. Still, there were places
for them to land in order to be truly well-preserved.
Several types of
inorganic replacement of the organic remains were mentioned in my reading;
phosphorus, silica, pyrite (iron) and microbial mats. But in all these cases,
this chemical change happened underwater. And if I read things rightly, under
seawater.
The articles did
have some pictures of these fossils, but they weren’t of T Rexes or stegosaurs,
so I didn’t know what to look for. I gather that the large majority of these
fossils are from way back when most creatures didn’t have bones, so they weren’t
very large, and they hadn’t been well known before Lagerstatte beds were found.
I would have
preferred to see one of these fossils first hand. Not to touch it, but when you
have a picture, you can’t change the angle of how the light hits it and bounces
into your eye. Sometimes just changing the angle a little can let you see
details you otherwise wouldn’t notice. So I feel like having the item in front
of me - even if in a display case - would let me study the tiny nuances that
make these discoveries so exciting for those in the field.
Now, how could I
use this knowledge in my writing? I don’t know. One of the beauties of writing
fiction is that you get to use bits and pieces of knowledge in unimagined ways.
So now that I have this knowledge, I can look for ways to use it.
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