Pont y Fenni Quarry and Road Cutting
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Geology & landscape
Mining / Industrial: Quarry
Description
Description A key faunal locality for the Arenig Series. Well preserved faunas are rare in the hirundo Zone Arenig rocks of South Wales, notably the classic St David's area, due to tectonic deformation. Pont y Fenni provides a diverse fauna with trilobites, graptolites, brachiopods, bivalves, hyoliths, ostracods and phyllocarids, all well enough preserved for detailed palaeontological studies. In layman’s terms, the interest of this site may be expressed more simply, and such a statement is provided below. This should not be taken as definitive and further information as to details of this interest can be obtained from the Countryside Council for Wales. These quarry and roadside exposures have yielded a most diverse assemblage of fossils dating back to a time over 500 million years ago when this area lay beneath the sea. Fossils dating from this interval of geological time are very poorly represented elsewhere in South Wales as earth movements, such as folding and faulting which occurred after these rocks were formed, destroyed or deformed many valuable specimens. The fossils described from this locality include trilobites, (a group of sea-living arthropods which are now extinct), graptolites (colonial organisms which were particularly abundant in early geological times) and a wide variety of shelly fossils such as brachiopods and bivalves.