[Rockhounds] Enormous graveyard of alien-like sea creatures discovered at 'Jurassic Pompeii' in central UK

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Paleontologists have uncovered an enormous fossil graveyard of squiggly,
alien-like Jurassic sea creatures beneath a limestone quarry in the U.K.'s
Cotswolds region.

The fossil find includes perhaps tens of thousands of marine invertebrates
called echinoderms — meaning "hedgehog skin" in Greek, and including the
ancient ancestors of modern starfish, *sea cucumbers*
<https://www.livescience.com/sea-cucumbers.html>, sea urchins and
frilly-limbed sea lilies — immaculately preserved at all stages of their
life cycles, the researchers *said in a statement*
<https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2021/july/huge-jurassic-seabed-uncovered-in-cotswolds-quarry.html>
.

But right when things were booming, the thriving seabed community met a
cataclysmic end; a mysterious catastrophe — perhaps a mudslide triggered by
an earthquake — suffocated and entombed the animals for 167 million years.

"What we've got here is a sort of Jurassic *Pompeii*
<https://www.livescience.com/27871-mount-vesuvius-pompeii.html>," Neville
Hollingworth, an amateur fossil hunter who discovered the cache on a hike
with his wife Sally, *told BBC.com*
<https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57853537>.

"[The creatures] tried to protect themselves, adopting the stress position
of pulling their arms in, but it was all in vain," Tim Ewin, a
paleontologist and senior curator at the Natural History Museum of London,
told BBC. "They were pushed into the sediment and buried alive."

https://www.livescience.com/jurassic-pompeii-echinoderm-fossils-cotswolds