This is Mazon Monday post #20. What's your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:[email protected].
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Back in 2017, Palaeocast posted a lecture called "Is a 'one size fits all' taphonomic model appropriate for the Mazon Creek" by Dr. Thomas Clements, of the University of Birmingham in the UK. You may remember Dr. Clements... he was part of a 2016 paper that looked at the preservation of the eyes of the Tullymonster to determine that it is a vertebrate. That study looked into the chemical makeup of the preservation of the eyes. More recently, he was co-author of "The Mazon Creek Lagerstätte: a diverse late Palaeozoic ecosystem entombed within siderite concretions". A paper that looks at siderite concretion formation within the Mazon Creek deposit.
In this lecture, he details research which aims to understand the taphonomy of Mazon Creek fossils. Following in a similar fashion to the Tullymonster research, it includes a survey of which tissues are preserved across multiple specimens of the same species to see if there are patterns to the modes of preservation. Additionally, multiple taxa are included in the research, including but not limited to chitons, arthropods, and polychaete worms. The decay of modern species of polychaetes is also helping in the analysis. Although this video only 10 minutes long, it is a fascinating glimpse into some new modern statistical and chemical methods of Paleontology. Hopefully, this research will lead to more papers published which will shed some light on the amazing fossils.
