Sea currents
Look carefully and you can see that many of the legs of these three brittle stars are orientated towards the top right of the image. This suggests that there was a water current flowing across the sea bed at the time these animals became fossilised. As shown in the lower photo, brittle stars can accumulate in large numbers. It is likely that our specimens were caught up in a storm that swept across a shallow sea bed, burying them in sediment and preserving them in that moment of time.
