The great survivors

As a group brachiopods have been with us for over 500 million years and they are among the most common fossils that occur in the Ordovician and Silurian rocks of Shropshire.

Those found in the modern seas and oceans are far less common than the fossil record suggests they once were and they now seem to be out-competed by bivalve molluscs. However they do survive and there are a few hundred current species compared to thousands of fossil species.

Amazingly, some types of brachiopods have changed very little over time and 400 million year old fossils of Lingula look much the same as the modern Lingula does today.

We seem to have been digitising these little fellas for a while now and have just made some 3d models live on our sketchfab site. Fossils in Shropshire

Check them out.