![]() ![]() Then, one day in mid-August 2022, Marano finally got the chance. Hurricane Irma and a year’s long active-duty deployment as a Coast Guard reservist during the height of the pandemic would delay that plan. ![]() So, he promised himself to one day explore the site with a team of divers. “We still needed to get in the water and get eyes on it,” Marano said. Once he returned to the mainland, he did a little sleuthing, learning that the area was a submerged island near the 100-square-mile park where a 19 th-century quarantine hospital and cemetery once may have been located. “Usually, that indicates there’s some kind of manmade structure.”Ĭould the peculiar dots have been navigational aids from a bygone era? Marano wasn’t sure. ![]() “Very early in my archaeological career, I was taught that you don’t find patterns or rigid shapes in nature,” said Marano, an adjunct professor in the Exploration Sciences Program at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. Maritime archaeologist Joshua Marano had taken the short flight on numerous occasions, traveling to the park’s historic Fort Jefferson to assist in restoration projects.īut one day in the summer of 2016, as the seaplane descended for an aquatic landing, Marano saw something unusual: an L-shaped pattern of dots below the water. We’re excited to see what comes next.The view from the passenger window of the turboprop seaplane always had been the same: miles and miles of clear blue water as the aircraft made the 30-minute flight from Key West to Dry Tortugas National Park. “There are a lot of unanswered questions, and this site is going to keep producing new discoveries for decades. “Every time we go back, we find something new, and sometimes it’s something truly extraordinary,” he said. The research is published in Nature Ecology And Evolution.īotting said that despite the huge number of fossils already discovered, work has barely begun. Researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden also dissolved some of the rock in hydrofluoric acid, and extracted minute fragments that showed cellular-level detail. Doing so quickly yielded about $20,000 (£16,000), more than twice the pair’s original goal. The small size of the fossils made them difficult to examine without high-power microscopes, so the quarry’s landowner suggested they crowdsource funds to buy the necessary equipment. However, it was only when the pandemic stopped them from travelling to work at Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales – in Cardiff that they decided to take a closer look at the quarry, the precise location of which is being kept secret. The couple, both of whom have PhDs in palaeontology, but do not hold academic positions, discovered the site about a decade ago. “Here, it seems, we’ve got everything,” said Botting.ĭr Lucy Muir and Dr Joe Botting examine a fossil specimen at Castle Bank. It is when ecology diversified, as well as animals themselves.”Īlthough other Ordovician fossil sites exist, most are older and preserve only a limited fauna, with few entirely soft-bodied animals. I like to refer to it as ‘when life got interesting’. Muir said: “It coincides with the Great Ordovician Biodiversification event, when animals with hard skeletons were evolving rapidly. The Castle Bank fossils could help to bridge that gap, providing an insight into how life was evolving at a time when there was virtually no life on land, but animals and algae were thriving in the seas. But by 400m years ago, almost all of these creatures had disappeared, eventually replaced by the ancestors of many modern animals. The Cambrian explosion, which occurred between 540m and 485m years ago, was a period when many new and complex life forms arose. The site is important because it gives us a new window into how life was evolving at the time. Many of the 170-odd fossils discovered so far have preserved soft tissues such as digestive systems, eyes, optic nerves and brains, and include worms, starfish, sponges, crustaceans and extinct arthropods. Photograph: Nature Ecology & Evolution/PA ![]() An artist impression of the Castle Bank community of creatures by Yang Dinghua. ![]()
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