New fossil assemblages from the Early Ordovician Fezouata Biota
Saleh, Farid, Vaucher, Romain, Vidal, Muriel, Hariri, Khadija El, Laibl, Lukáš, Daley, Allison C., Gutiérrez-Marco, Juan Carlos, Candela, Yves, Harper, David A.T., Ortega-Hernández, Javier, Ma, Xiaoya, Rida, Ariba, Vizcaïno, Daniel, and Lefebvre, Bertrand (2022) New fossil assemblages from the Early Ordovician Fezouata Biota. Scientific Reports, 12 (1). 20773.
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Abstract
The Fezouata Biota (Morocco) is a unique Early Ordovician fossil assemblage. The discovery of this biota revolutionized our understanding of Earth’s early animal diversifications—the Cambrian Explosion and the Ordovician Radiation—by suggesting an evolutionary continuum between both events. Herein, we describe Taichoute, a new fossil locality from the Fezouata Shale. This locality extends the temporal distribution of fossil preservation from this formation into the upper Floian, while also expanding the range of depositional environments to more distal parts of the shelf. In Taichoute, most animals were transported by density flows, unlike the in-situ preservation of animals recovered in previously investigated Fezouata sites. Taichoute is dominated by three-dimensionally preserved, and heavily sclerotized fragments of large euarthropods—possibly representing nektobenthic/nektic bivalved taxa and/or hurdiid radiodonts. Resolving whether this dominance reflects a legitimate aspect of the original ecosystem or a preservational bias requires an in-depth assessment of the environmental conditions at this site. Nevertheless, Taichoute provides novel preservational and palaeontological insights during a key evolutionary transition in the history of life on Earth.
| Item ID: | 86850 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 2045-2322 |
| Copyright Information: | © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Date Deposited: | 02 Sep 2025 04:16 |
| FoR Codes: | 37 EARTH SCIENCES > 3705 Geology > 370506 Palaeontology (incl. palynology) @ 100% |
| SEO Codes: | 28 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 2801 Expanding knowledge > 280107 Expanding knowledge in the earth sciences @ 100% |
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