Post by Joe Botting on Jan 24, 2015 15:53:46 GMT -5
We've moved house recently, and have space to start sorting out the fossils at last... This means we get to see lots of fossils that haven't seen daylight for a long while, and which, to be honest, we'd forgotten about, and which needed prepping or just a much closer look. Here's one:
It's Meadowtownella cf. serrata, a species that Tim Conway and I described based on abundant small fragments from one locality at Carreg-grog (murchisoni Biozone, Middle Ordovician). Despite seeing hundreds of individual plates, we never found anything semi-complete, and we've never seen it at any other site. Until this one. The pygidium is flipped over and going into the rock, but you can see the (huge number of) spine bases forming an arc superimposed on the back end of the thorax. The cephalon is largely disarticulated, but one nice free cheek helps a lot. There are a few differences from the type material, I must admit; the spines are longer around the edge of the free cheek, and from the ends of the thoracic segments, but this is likely to be partly related to the relatively early growth stage; this is a tiddler, at less than centimetre long.
It's quite ironic, for a species that has such distinctive ornament that even fragments of rib are identifiable, that the first specimen from a new location is the most complete ever found!
It's Meadowtownella cf. serrata, a species that Tim Conway and I described based on abundant small fragments from one locality at Carreg-grog (murchisoni Biozone, Middle Ordovician). Despite seeing hundreds of individual plates, we never found anything semi-complete, and we've never seen it at any other site. Until this one. The pygidium is flipped over and going into the rock, but you can see the (huge number of) spine bases forming an arc superimposed on the back end of the thorax. The cephalon is largely disarticulated, but one nice free cheek helps a lot. There are a few differences from the type material, I must admit; the spines are longer around the edge of the free cheek, and from the ends of the thoracic segments, but this is likely to be partly related to the relatively early growth stage; this is a tiddler, at less than centimetre long.
It's quite ironic, for a species that has such distinctive ornament that even fragments of rib are identifiable, that the first specimen from a new location is the most complete ever found!
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