ABSTRACT
The Herefordshire fossils are not visually spectacular in hand specimen, and the calcite that gives them their sparkle would normally not preserve fine details, but the preservation of arthropod legs is so unusual, it was worth the team persevering and finding a way to extract more information from the specimens. At first, they studied these concretions by splitting them into pieces with a hydraulic vice until a fossil appeared. About half of the concretions examined in this way contained fossils. They attempted to discern the morphology of the commoner species, such as the tiny arthropod Offacolus kingi, by studying them in several hundred randomly split concretions (72).
