Konservat-Lagerstätte (exceptional preservation)
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A deposit in which soft tissues are preserved, as opposed to the shells, bones and teeth that make up almost the whole normal fossil record. Exceptional preservation requires an unusual conjunction — rapid burial, an absence of oxygen and of scavengers, and early mineralisation of tissue before decay destroys it — and each of those conditions is rare, so Lagerstätten are scattered thinly and unevenly through time and space. This is the concept that makes the Cambrian explosion legible as a question about evidence rather than only about biology. Between roughly 520 and 505 million years ago several Lagerstätten happen to exist, so a fauna of soft-bodied animals is visible; through most of the surrounding record no such window exists, and the same animals would leave nothing. A reader who has understood Lagerstätten can no longer read a first appearance in the fossil record as a first appearance in the world, and that single correction changes how every date in this Journey should be held.
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Timeline
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Connections · 1
- The Cambrian explosionaffects
Assembled narrative · 1
Assembled from 28 blocks · 1 evidence · 19 related
- Story
- A deposit in which soft tissues are preserved, as opposed to the shells, bones and teeth that make up almost the whole normal fossil record. Exceptional preservation requires an unusual conjunction — rapid burial, an absence of oxygen and of scavengers, and early mineralisation of tissue before decay destroys it — and each of those conditions is rare, so Lagerstätten are scattered thinly and unevenly through time and space. This is the concept that makes the Cambrian explosion legible as a question about evidence rather than only about biology. Between roughly 520 and 505 million years ago several Lagerstätten happen to exist, so a fauna of soft-bodied animals is visible; through most of the surrounding record no such window exists, and the same animals would leave nothing. A reader who has understood Lagerstätten can no longer read a first appearance in the fossil record as a first appearance in the world, and that single correction changes how every date in this Journey should be held.
- Knowledge
- Konservat-Lagerstätte (exceptional preservation)
- The Cambrian explosion
- Connections
- The Cambrian explosion
- Burgess Shale, Yoho National Park
- Chengjiang fossil site, Yunnan
- The Cambrian explosion
- Hou Xianguang finds the Chengjiang fauna
- Molecular clock dating
- Ediacara Hills, Flinders Ranges
- Fortune Head GSSP, Newfoundland
- Konservat-Lagerstätte (exceptional preservation)
- Burgess Shale, Yoho National Park
- Anomalocaris
- Chengjiang fossil site, Yunnan
- The Great Oxidation Event
- The end-Ordovician mass extinction
- Fortune Head GSSP, Newfoundland
- Burgess Shale, Yoho National Park
- Chengjiang fossil site, Yunnan
- Anomalocaris
- Konservat-Lagerstätte (exceptional preservation)
- Molecular clock dating
- Evidence
- Supports the narrative of Walcott's discovery and classification, the Whittington–Briggs–Conway Morris re-description, and the reassembly of Anomalocaris from three separately named fossils. Gould's own thesis about disparity and contingency is a contested interpretation and is not asserted as fact in this pack. V55 verification basis: this session had no network access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked and the WebSearch budget was exhausted — so the cited work was not retrieved and its pagination was not re-checked.
Observed changes · 0
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/atlas?object=CONCEPT_LAGERSTATTE&experience=CONCEPT_LAGERSTATTE