The fossil foundation on the east bank of the Lake Simoe in southern Ontario is considered a paleo-pompei because of its numerous, well-preserved living beings. Now a team led by Joseph Moysiuk from the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto announced another extraordinary discovery: Tomlinsonus Dimitrii, an arthropod from the extinct group of the Marrellomorpha, which lived in the Ocean in the Ordovizia. This was reported by the working group in the "Journal of Paleontology".
Moysiuk and Co were particularly impressed by the exceptionally well-preserved condition of the fossil, as the animal consisted mainly of soft tissues: they fossilize only under special conditions, as they were given on site in shallow and very calcareous water. The specimen of Tomlinsonus dimitrii measures only six centimeters, but has some rather unusual characteristics. Thus, the animal had a kind of head shield with two curved horns, which are equipped with feather-like spines. The segmented body of the animal, in turn, resembles that of other arthropods, such as insects, and contains several pairs of segmented limbs.
Above all, the front pair of legs below the head stands out: it is relatively long, and both legs ended with foot -like processes that the team reminded of stilts with which the animals ran over the sea floor. Tomlinsonus Dimitrii was also blind because the researchers could not detect any visual organs. According to the paleontologists, the newly described species is similar to another extent to another extent, named Marrella Splendens, which was found in the Burgess Shale-one for their variety of world-famous sites in the Yoho National Park in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. It houses numerous animals from the Cambrium.
The area around Lake Simcoe used to be part of a shallow tropical ocean that may have been repeatedly hit by hurricanes or other forces of nature. They triggered mudslides, which buried the local wildlife and thus preserved it for posterity.
