FINDING AND DESCRIBING THE EXCEPTIONAL: A MODERN DEFINITION OF FOSSIL-LAGERSTÄTTEN

Seilacher coined the term Fossil-Lagerstätte in his 1970 paper ‘Begriff und Bedeutung der Fossil-Lagerstätten’. In this paper he defined Fossil-Lagerstätten as “Rock bodies, which in quality and quantity preserve an unusual amount of paleontological information”. He borrowed the term Lagerstätte from economic geology, where it refers to ‘an unusually high, local concentration of one or multiple chemical elements in the Earth’s crust’. In his paper, Seilacher emphasized that Fossil-Lagerstätten are created under exceptional circumstances and will therefore present a distinct but perhaps atypical view of the contemporary life it preserves. Since the 1970s, the meaning and range of Fossil-Lagerstätte has broadened beyond its original focus; the definitions of both Konservat-Lagerstätten and Konzentrat-Lagerstätten have been stretched to the limits of their intention, and sometimes beyond.

Here we propose an updated classification scheme and definition, not only based on abundance of fossils at a locality and/or the quality of their preservation, but also considering: (1) the kind of fossils present; (2) their preservation style, often used to define Paleozoic and earlier Lagerstätten (see Butterfield 2003); and (3) measurable variables that will lay a framework to distinguish between Lagerstätte-type and regular fossil deposits. We are also proposing guidelines to follow when identifying a novel Lagerstätte at a previously unreported locality and how to collect data to confirm its status as a Lagerstätte.