Tafilalt Volume of Geological Society of London, Special Publications
January 9, 2023
In 2022, a monographic issue of the important British Geological Society of London, Special Publication No. 485 entitled "The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event: Insights from the Tafilalt Biota, Morocco" was published.
This issue is dedicated to one of the world's most important sites with exceptional fossil preservation - the Upper Ordovician Tafilalt lagerstätte in Morocco. The editors of this monographic issue are world leaders in the investigations of individual groups from the UK, Spain, France, and Belgium (Dr. P. Van Roy, a new member of the Sedimentary Formations Department of the CGS). Of the twenty-one papers published in the Volume, CGS staff authored or co-authored six of them (plus three papers by P. Van Roy).
Dr. M. Nohejlová is the main author or co-author of four papers in this issue - prominent among them is the nearly 200-page monographic treatment of cornute stylophoran echinoderms by Lefebvre et al. (2022). Dr. M. Polechová, in turn, co-authored an extensive sixty-page study devoted to the Upper Ordovician molluscs of the central and eastern Anti-Atlas. A critical summary of the existing knowledge on the exceptional preservation of Ordovician trilobites from African West Gondwana, European Perigondwana and Avalonia is given by P. Budil and O. Fatka.
The Geological Society of London, Special Publications issue discussed above is one of the major global milestones in the study of exceptional preservation of fossil organisms, together with the previously published monothematic issue of 3X Palaeo on the Lower Ordovician Fezouata Biota. I would thus like to congratulate both colleagues on their fine and important outputs.