Llanfawr Mudstones Lagerstatte

[Joe Botting]

Greetings all. Finally, our paper on the first new exceptionally preserved fauna at Llandrindod is out!
geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/2011/08/05/G32143.1.abstract
(if you'd like a copy, send us your email in a personal message).

The fauna is a pyritised biota in black mudstones, which means that the fossils look quite pretty on the surface:

hydroid by joe with a camera, on Flickr

but are quite hard to work with. They look rather better in X-ray, though:

hidden fossils... by joe with a camera, on Flickr

Rather than repeating myself too much, I'll direct you to the following:
fossilology.blogspot.com
asoldasthehills.org/Lagerstatte.html
www.asoldasthehills.org/Xrays.htm (some browsers may have trouble with this one).

We've also got some CT images of a few of the fossils, courtesy of Mark Sutton - it's all in the paper, for those interested.
Cheers,
Joe

[ammocarbsteve]

Congratulations on the paper Joe & Lucy...

[pleecan (Peter Lee)]

Fantastic! Congratulations to Joe and Lucy! I would like a copy of the the paper too
Peter

[pleecan (Peter Lee)]

Joe your last link:
www.asoldasthehills.org/Xrays.htm
When you click on the tumbnail ... you get no picture but a series of scripts... a small bug....
Currently viewing on Windows 7 andMS Explore 9

[Joe Botting]

Thanks for that, Peter... unfortunately it's fine with us on IE but I know Firefox has had problems. It's a glitch from being set up in Dreamweaver, we think, and will need to be redone completely to sort it. One day...
Will send you a pdf pronto.

[pleecan (Peter Lee)]

Thanks very much Joe! I got the paper : ) Kind of neat to use Xrays to see through rock and to image the delicate fossil in 3D buried in the stone matrix... if resolution of an image is proportional to Braggs Law the a short wavelength should yield even sharper resolution.... wonder if there is such a thing as a Gamma Rays imager....

[Joe Botting]

It's been done on the Hunsruck Slate for a long time, so we certainly weren't the first to come up with it. It's a slow process, and Lucy did hundreds of exposures, but very effective. The resolution limit is usually either the grain of the film, the grainsize of the pyrite, or the resolution of the scanner. Digital X-ray makes things far, far easier, but the resolution isn't there. And as you could see, the CT has a way to go, as well. It's still much better than mechanical preparation, though, for a lot of things.

[pleecan (Peter Lee)]

It is amazing the science advancement with tools to see inside rock......