Soom Shale

The Soom Shale is a Late Ordovician shale deposit in the Cedarberg region of South Africa's Western Cape, roughly four hundred and forty five million years old, formed from sediment deposited in cold, oxygen poor waters associated with an ice age, which preserved soft bodied marine animals, including one of the oldest known jawless fish with soft tissue intact, from a period when most such deposits elsewhere were destroyed by the era's mass extinction and glaciation. It is one of the few fossil windows onto marine life immediately following the end-Ordovician extinction.