FOSSILS which have been keeping secrets for more than 444 million years are being revealed this weekend.
Llandrindod Wells-based palaeontologists, husband and wife Dr Joe Botting and Dr Lucy Muir, will be sharing the secrets that they found in fossils from China.
The leading fossil sponge specialists have made world-wide headlines after finding the fossil which dates back to the Ordovician Period, just after a second mass-extinction to hit the world 444million years ago.
He said: "This extinction was among the largest know, with more than 85% of species being lost. Our study reveals an extraordinarily diverse, sponge-dominated community thriving immediately after the Hirnantian extinction in Zhejiang, South China.
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ÒWe’re not just finding a few species, as we’d expect. We now have over a hundred, and the total just keeps going up. This is even more diverse than the richest parts of the modern deep sea floor. It looks like they didn’t just survive the mass extinction: they really flourished. And it’s not just their diversity that is important.
"The fauna provides a unique window into a post-extinction ecosystem. The sponges are often large and structurally complex and represent numerous different lineages that survived the extinction.
"There are lots of implications from this fauna, about how ecology recovers after mass extinctions, and about the origin and evolution of modern sponge groups."
Their find has made headlines around the world after a paper they wrote was published in prestigious journal Current Biology. Dr Muir and Dr Botting are no strangers to groundbreaking discoveries, after unearthing fossils dating back to the same Ordovician period, at a disused quarry in their home town.
Scientists believe they have made a remarkable discovery of fossils said to be more than 450 million years old in a disused Powys quarry. The 2004 discovery shed new light on how ocean communities have evolved.
The couple are sharing their discoveries from Powys to China at the Commodore Hotel in Llandrindod Wells at 7 pm on Friday, February 24.