Artistic reconstruction of the Ordovician fossils Mieridduryn bonniae. Credit: Original artwork by Franz Anthony
Phys.org has a story about a new "weird wonder" from the Ordovician Period. This new animal is called Mieridduryn bonniae and is thought to be related to Opabinia, which is one of the iconic animals discovered in the Burgess Shale by Charles Walcott in 1909. Many of the Burgess Shale animals were termed "weird wonders" by the late Steven J. Gould in his 1989 book "Wonderful Life". M. bonniae lived in what is now mid Wales (UK) near Llandrindod Wells. It was discovered during the COVID 19 lockdowns in a sheep field by by independent researchers and Llandrindod residents Dr. Joseph Botting and Dr. Lucy Muir, Honorary Research Fellows at Amgueddfa Cymru—National Museum Wales. The two specimens are described in an paper published in the journal Nature Communications.
The quarry is well known as one of several local sites yielding new species of fossil sponges. "When the lockdown started, I thought I'd make one more trip to collect some last sponges before finally writing them up," said Botting, "of course, that was the day that I found something sticking its tentacles out of a tube instead."
"This is the sort of thing that paleontologists dream of, truly soft-body preservation," said Muir, "we didn't sleep well, that night." That was the beginning of an extensive and ongoing investigation that grew into an international collaboration, with lead author Dr. Stephen Pates (University of Cambridge) and senior author Dr. Joanna Wolfe (The Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University).
Among the fossils unearthed so far are two very unexpected leftovers from the Cambrian "weird wonders." Pates met with Botting and Muir to study the specimens using microscopes purchased through crowd-funding to examine the tiny specimens. The larger specimen measured 13 mm, while the smaller measured a miniscule 3 mm (for comparison Opabinia specimens can be 20 times as long).