My name’s Katie, I work here at the Lapworth
Museum as Assistant Curator.
I'm here to show you this exceptionally preserved
shrimp, Antrimpos.
It's very well preserved in that you can see
all of its appendages which you wouldn't usually
see.
So, you've got all of the legs and antennae
that are all preserved here for you.
It's from the Solnhofen Limestone in Germany.
It's from the Jurassic, so it's about 150
million years old, and it was preserved in
limestone so it would have been shallow water,
warm conditions - much like a shrimp would
live today in the sea.
The shrimp would have had a benthic mode of
life, so it would have lived on the sea floor
eating plants and other little animals that
it could have eaten but, in turn, it would
have also been predated on by fish and marine
reptiles, that kind of thing much like in
modern day ecosystems.
It's likely that this has been preserved in
a lagoon environment so basically in the lagoon
the evaporation rate would have been very
high producing a very inhospitable environment.
So, when the shrimp was swept into the lagoon
the hyper saline, high salt, conditions, coupled
with the anoxic, low oxygen, environment would
have meant that there were no predators or
scavengers to eat the shrimp after it had
died.
It would have sunk to the bottom very quickly
and been buried by sediment and this is what
has resulted in the exceptional preservation
of the shrimp that you see before you.
