The Late Ordovician Soom Shale Lagerstätte: an Extraordinary Post-Glacial Fossil and Sedimentary Record

Downloaded from http://jgs.lyellcollection.org/ by guest on September 26, 2021 Review focus Journal of the Geological Society Published online October 20, 2016 doi:10.1144/jgs2016-076 | Vol. 174 | 2017 | pp. 1–9 The late Ordovician Soom Shale Lagerstätte: an extraordinary post-glacial fossil and sedimentary record Sarah E. Gabbott1*, Claire Browning2, Johannes N. Theron3 & Rowan J. Whittle4 1 Department of Geology, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK 2 Council for Geoscience, PO Box 572, Belville 7535, South Africa 3 Department of Earth Sciences, University of Stellenbosch, Private Bag X1, Matieland 7602, South Africa 4 British Antarctic Survey, High Cross, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0ET, UK * Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract: Fossils of the Late Ordovician Soom Shale Lagerstätte are characterized by exceptional preservation of their soft tissues in clay minerals. The low-diversity community lived in an unusual cold-water setting, dominated by anoxic bottom waters, in the immediate aftermath of the Hirnantian glaciation. Giant conodonts represented by complete tooth sets, and one with trunk musculature and liver preserved, unarmoured jawless fish, lobopods and enigmatic taxa are some of the more important fossils. Furthermore, this Lagerstätte also preserves biomineralized Ordovician taxa such as brachiopods, orthoconic nautiloids and trilobites. It is important in capturing the only known examples of many taxa, extending temporal ranges of others and providing a unique glimpse of a post-glacial refugium, at a time when other Lagerstätten are unknown. Received 24 June 2016; revised 8 August 2016; accepted 17 August 2016 The late Ordovician Soom Shale Lagerstätte, Western Cape Province, searching for potential biostratigraphical markers. The team South Africa has produced an array of marine fossils, many of which focused on the Cedarberg Formation, the most prominent preserve spectacular details of their soft (i.e. nonbiomineralized) argillaceous unit in a thick sequence of Palaeozoic sandstones. In tissues. Anatomical features usually lost rapidly after death, through the basal member of the Cedarberg Formation, the Soom Shale scavenging or decomposition, such as eyes, gills, muscles and livers, Member, they discovered several centimetre-sized spiky elements, are preserved. Some of the fossil assemblage is typical of a shallow which occurred together in loose bundles. These fossils were first marine Ordovician setting, such as brachiopods, trilobites and published as the earliest record of vascular land plants or their orthoconic nautiloids. However, other taxa, such as the naraoiid ancestors (Kovács-Endrödy 1986). However, this interpretation was Soomaspis (Fortey & Theron 1995), a marine lobopodian (Whittle overturned and the fossils were convincingly shown to be bedding et al. 2009) and undescribed taxa including a naked agnathan plane assemblages of conodonts (Theron et al. 1990). Subsequently, ( jawless fish) and a multi-segmented enigmatic fossil would not the search for additional fossil material has been spearheaded by seem out of place in a Cambrian Lagerstätte (Selden & Nudds 2004). Johannes Theron and Dick Aldridge (to whom this paper is dedicated) Thus, the Soom Shale appears to chronicle surviving taxa from the and this yielded a variety of taxa, many with soft tissues preserved. Cambrian radiation together with more conventional Ordovician taxa, with aspects of their soft part anatomy preserved. Location, stratigraphy and age The Soom Shale Lagerstätte is distinctive in several ways: the host shale itself is conspicuous as the only fine-grained lithology in a The Soom Shale Member and overlying Disa Siltstone Member 3000 m thick sequence of dominantly arenaceous rocks; the fossils together form the Cedarberg Formation of the Table Mountain record life in a cold-water, glacially influenced marine setting in the Group, part of the Cape Supergroup (Figs 1 and 2). To date, fossils immediate aftermath of a mass extinction and major glaciation; the in the Soom Shale Member have been found across a geographically mode of preservation is the inverse of the ‘normal’ fossil record: in the wide area: an age-diagnostic mucronaspidine trilobite in the Hex Soom Shale the hard, biomineralized components of animals are River Mountains (Cocks & Fortey 1986) as well as the typical demineralized, and are often comparatively poorly preserved, Hirnantian brachiopod fauna from Wellington to Porterville (Fig. 1). whereas nonbiomineralized decay-prone anatomy is frequently The principal fossil site for exceptional preservation in the Soom preserved in exquisite detail. This uniqueness, however, does not Shale Member is at Keurbos farm. diminish the significance and importance of the fossil assemblage The Cedarberg Formation forms a conspicuous recessive, from this deposit. As well as recording the earliest and latest known laterally persistent, marker horizon (about 120 m thick), among examples of several taxa, thus extending the known temporal ranges predominantly arenitic units of the Table Mountain Group (Fig. 1b). of several organisms, the Soom Shale also preserves several taxa The Soom Shale Member is about 10 – 15 m thick and is underlain unrecorded elsewhere, adding to our knowledge of end-Ordovician by the glacially derived Pakhuis Formation (Aldridge et al. 2001). biodiversity and ecology. Finally, as well as exceptional fossil Upwards it merges with the thinly bedded Disa Siltstone Member preservation, the lithology itself constitutes an undisturbed and composed of alternating mudstone and siltstone. probably continuous archive of depositional processes and climate The Cedarberg Formation contains the only datable fossils in the change during and immediately after the dramatic collapse of the entire Table Mountain Group, a succession of latest Cambrian to Hirnantian (latest Ordovician) glaciation. Early Devonian age (Rust, 1967). The highest resolution dating of The first fossil discovery in the Soom Shale was in 1981, when a the Soom Shale Member (and also the Cedarberg Formation) is team of geologists from the Geological Survey of South Africa (now provided by chitinozoans (Spinachitina and its morphotypes). The Council for Geoscience), guided by Johannes Theron, were presence of S. oulebsiri restricts the age to a 1 myr interval of late © 2017 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/3.0/). Published by The Geological Society of London. Publishing disclaimer: www.geolsoc.org.uk/pub_ethics Downloaded from http://jgs.lyellcollection.org/ by guest on September 26, 2021 2 S. E. Gabbott et al. Fig. 1. (a) Palaeogeographical reconstruction for c. 444 Ma, showing that the palaeolatitude of the southernmost portion of South Africa was 30 – 45°S. (b) In outcrop the Soom Shale Member is distinctive and typically occurs as a recessive marker (here at Holfontein). (c) The outcrop of the Cape Supergroup in South Africa. The red box shows limits of map in (d). (d) Outcrop of the Table Mountain Group, and Cedarberg Formation showing fossil- bearing localities. Hirnantian to Rhuddanian time (Vandenbroucke et al. 2009). The glaciers, resulting from late Ordovician orogeny, are also implicated in absence of S. fragilis chitinozoans suggests that it underlies Silurian Pakhuis Formation deposition (Young et al. 2004). The Soom Shale (Rhuddanian) strata. Thus, a late Hirnantian age is most likely directly overlies the Pakhuis Formation with a gradational contact; (Vandenbroucke et al. 2009). indeed, within the lowermost metre of the Soom Shale diamict-like layers occur sporadically. The main part of the Soom Shale Member is composed of alternating laminae of mud and silt lacking evidence of The end-Ordovician glaciation, extinction and the Soom bioturbation, which were deposited during post-glacial transgression Shale (Gabbott 1998; Aldridge et al. 2001). High molybdenum abundance and During the Hirnantian an extensive, but short-lived, glaciation, centred carbon, sulphur and iron geochemistry point to a dominantly anoxic and on the South Pole, is widely considered to be the leading cause of the at times euxinic basin (Fig. 2; Gabbott 1998). Thus, together the Pakhuis second largest extinction event in the Phanerozoic (Sepkoski 1996). The and Cedarberg Formations provide a continuous lithological record of precise mechanisms that caused up to 85% of marine species to become the rapid collapse of the ice sheet in South Africa, and subsequent extinct are still debated (see Harper et al. 2014) but it is clear that the climatic amelioration. However, the Soom Shale sediments suggest a event had two phases (e.g. Sheehan 2001; Sutcliffe et al. 2000). The first lingering glacial influence (see Box 1). is associated with the onset of glaciation (Delabroye & Vecoli 2010); the The Soom Shale preserves some taxa of the distinctive Hirnantian second was prompted by the melting of the Gondwanan ice sheet, which brachiopod fauna (Bassett et al. 2009). Elsewhere, this fauna is led to glacioeustatic rise (Berry et al. 1995; Brenchley et al. 1995; known to have survived the first extinction phase across high to Sheehan 2001) and extensive black shale deposition (Armstrong & Coe moderate latitudes but the fauna disappeared almost entirely during 1997; Delabroye & Vecoli 2010). A large continental ice sheet extended the second extinction phase, except in a couple of refugia (Rong & outwards from central Africa (Beuf et

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