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22 - Mapping the Rise of the Animals: Cambrian Bodies in the Sirius Pass, North Greenland

from Part II - Essays: Inspiring Fieldwork

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2020

Tim Burt
Affiliation:
Durham University
Des Thompson
Affiliation:
Scottish Natural Heritage
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Summary

First some key facts: the Sirius Passet fossil biota is the most remote, least well known and, to date, one of the least diverse of the Cambrian exceptionally preserved assemblages or Lagerstätten (Harper et al., 2019). Following its serendipitous discovery in 1984, by field geologists working for the Geological Survey of Greenland, the locality in the Buen Formation, on the edge of J. P. Koch Fjord in North Greenland has been visited by only seven collecting expeditions, most recently in 2009 and 2011 by multidisciplinary and multinational groups, led by the author when a member of staff in the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, and in 2016 and 2017 by a UK–South Korea group. The Sirius Passet Lagerstätte occurs in black mudstones deposited at the shelf–slope break on the Laurentian margin. Although deformed and metamorphosed by a Devonian tectonic event, the Ellesmerian Orogeny, the locality preserves, to a large degree, the original depositional relationships and allows an interpretation of the environmental setting of this early Cambrian ecosystem; thus it is key to understanding the environmental constraints on the Cambrian Explosion. The fossiliferous site is located in the Sirius Pass, beside J. P. Koch Fjord, Peary Land, North Greenland, at 82° 47.59ʹ N, 42° 13.54ʹ W (Figure 22.1) and an altitude of 420 m. This remote locality can only be reached by short take-off and landing aircraft that can use a rough airstrip in the valley, 2 km to the west–north-west.

Type
Chapter
Information
Curious about Nature
A Passion for Fieldwork
, pp. 208 - 211
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

Hammarlund, E. U., Smith, M. P., Rasmussen, J. A., et al. (2019). The Sirius Passet Lagerstätte of North Greenland: a geochemical window on early Cambrian low oxygen environments and ecosystems. Geobiology 17, 12–26.Google Scholar
Harper, D. A. T., Hammarlund, E. U., Topper, T. P., et al. (2019). The Sirius Passet Lagerstätte of North Greenland: a remote window on the Cambrian Explosion. Journal of the Geological Society, https://doi.org/10.1144/jgs2019-043.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Park, T-Y. S., Kihm, J-H., Woo, J., et al. (2018). Brain and eyes of Kerygmachela reveal protocerebral ancestry of the panarthropod head. Nature Communications 9, 1019.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Strang, K. M., Armstrong, H. A. and Harper, D. A. T. (2016). Minerals in the gut: scoping a Cambrian digestive system. Royal Society Open Science 3, 160420.Google Scholar
Topper, T. P., Greco, F., Hofmann, A., Beeby, A. and Harper, D. A. T. (2018). Characterization of kerogenous films and taphonomic modes of the Sirius Passet Lagerstätte, Greenland. Geology 46, 359362.Google Scholar
Vinther, J., Stein, M., Longrich, N. R. and Harper, D. A. T. (2014). A suspension-feeding anomalocarid from the Early Cambrian. Nature 507, 496499.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

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