'Jurassic Pompeii' yields thousands of 'squiggly wiggly' fossils - Yahoo News

"They tried to protect themselves, adopting the stress position of pulling their arms in," he continues.

"But it was all in vain; you can see where their arms got snagged open, right up to the crown.

The misfortune that struck this place 167 million years ago has delivered to him an extraordinary collection of fossil animals in what is unquestionably one of the most important Jurassic dig sites ever discovered in the UK.

Things have changed a bit since Jurassic times, though.

Stalked animals called sea lilies were tethered to the bed in great "meadows".

Their free-floating cousins, the feather stars, were ambling by, looking to grab the same particles of food.

And down in the sediment, starfish and brittle stars were feeling their way across the bottom with their fives arms, no doubt bumping into the occasional passing sea urchin or sea cucumber.

Most of what we know about the deep history of echinoderms from British fossils comes from the few specimens that emerged from railway cuttings and quarrying in the Victorian age.

"In this age of rock from the Middle Jurassic, only two species of starfish were known, represented by five specimens," he says.

"In just a few days of collecting here, we've got 12 starfish specimens, and expect to find many more.

"And it's the same for the comatulids, or stemless crinoids (feather stars) - 200 years' worth of collecting is represented at the museum by about 25 specimens.

Here, we've probably got 25 specimens just under our feet, and we've collected over 1,000.".

Lean in close to a slab of rock that's just been cleaned up and you'll observe what, at first sight, reminds you of a plate of noodles.

It is in fact a great mass of fossil arms from who knows how many sea lilies.

That's to say, all parts are still intact.

Specialists in fossil echinoderms believe the Cotswold quarry will help them better categorise the species' different life stages, their ecology and their proper position in evolutionary history.

She's busy trying to ease yet more feather stars from the clay layers that intersperse the quarry's limestone units.

"We were finding only tiny fragments of Jurassic sea creatures and we said, 'well, OK, let's take a slab home and see what we can reveal if we can clean it up'," she recalls.

These hold the mass of echinoderms.

You see this in the occasional chunk of Jurassic wood that pokes out from the goo.

This can explain the abundance of fossil animals but it doesn't explain their supreme preservation.

This is why the preservation is so amazing, because the scavengers couldn't then get to all those animals to pick them apart.".

As Neville Hollingworth likes to put it: "What we've got here is a sort of Jurassic Pompeii.".

Mission Jurassic: Searching for dinosaur bones.