Fezouata fossils show post-Cambrian survival of Selkirkia

Excited to share the latest species from the Ordovician Fezouata Shale biota of Morocco published in Biology Letters. New exceptional fossils from the Museum of Comparative Zoology  in Harvard and the Yale University Pebody Museum demonstrate that the tube-dwelling scalidophoran worm Selkirkia, widely known in Burgess Shale-type Cambrian biotas, survived several million years into the Early Ordovician. The new species, Selkirkia tsering, demonstrates the long term survival of yet another major animal group that originated during the Cambrian Explosion, and demonstrates a rare case of infaunal organisms in the Fezouata Shale. Check out the media coverage below, where Dr. Karma Nanglu (postdoctoral researcher) talks to the New York Times and National Public Radio about the discovery and its evolutionary implications.

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Comparison between the Ordovician Selkirkia tsering (a, d) and Cambrian species of Selkirkia from the Burgess Shale (c) and Chengjiang (h) biotas.	Biostratigraphic and geographic distrubiotion of Selkirkia throughout the Cambrian and Ordovician. Selkirkia tsering extends the stratigraphic range of the genus by approximately 25 million years.

This work is funded by NSF CAREER award (grant no. 2047192) ‘Ecological turnover at the dawn of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event—quantifying the Cambro-Ordovician transition through the lens of exceptional preservation’.