Paleontologists Find 450 Million-Year-Old Golden Fossil

Paleontologists have discovered a remarkable 450 million-year-old golden fossil preserved in fool’s gold, also known as iron pyrite.

The golden fossil is of a newly-identified species named Lomankus edgecombei, which lived during the Ordovician period 450 million years ago. The species is a kind of arthropod, making it a distant relative of horseshoe crabs, scorpions, and spiders. Arthropods are characterized by their hard exoskeletons and the fact they are invertebrates.

“There are lots of types of exceptional preservation, but preservation in pyrite of this kind is extremely rare. In the last half a billion years, there are only a handful of examples,” said Luke Parry, the lead author of a study on the fossil published in the journal Current Biology.

The golden fossil

450 Million-Year-Old 'Golden' Fossil Reveals a Prize Arthropod Ancestorhttps://t.co/ViyLB0ANxZ pic.twitter.com/ttv5TxXJ0H

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The Lomankus edgecombei specimen is entirely gold, encased in three layers of iron pyrite. It was fossilized through a rare process known as pyritization. In this type of fossilization, the animal’s organic material is slowly replaced by pyrite over time, creating detailed metal fossils like the golden fossil.

“As well as having their beautiful and striking golden color, these fossils are spectacularly preserved. They look as if they could just get up and scuttle away,” Parry said in a University of Oxford press release.

Parry and his research team discussed five further specimens in their study, which were originally found in New York state by a fossil collector. The collector donated three specimens to Yale Peabody Museum and Parry came across them in 2019 when completing a post-doctorate position at the university.

“I was pretty blown away by how well-preserved they were,” Parry said.

The fossils discussed in Parry’s study came from Beecher’s Trilobite Bed, a sedimentary deposit in New York famous for its well-preserved trilobites. Trilobites are prehistoric marine life that look like roly-poly bugs.

“Although pyrite forms very commonly found today in fine-grained marine rocks, pyritization of soft parts of organisms is very rare indeed because you need a special set of conditions for it to replace parts of a carcass,” Parry told Newsweek. “In life, Lomankus would have been soft – sort of like a shrimp or prawn – and not hardened with biominerals like a trilobite. If pyrite hadn’t replaced all of these soft parts, then they would have decayed away, and we would have no fossils at all.”

According to Parry, the golden fossil could have been buried alive in a landslide.

“The specimens of Lomankus would have been buried alive in a kind of submarine landslide called a turbidite, and so this rapid burial ensured that no decay had taken place before they were buried,” he said.