LiveScience has an interesting story about some bizarre creatures found in Morocco.  The animals are called stylophorans and lived during the Ordovician.  The fossils were discovered in 2014 in the Fezouata Formation.  They are now identified as echinoderms and are related to modern animals such as sea urchins, starfish, brittle stars, and sea lilies.  The original paper was published in the February 2019 issue of Geobios.

For the past 150 years, scientists have hotly debated a mysterious creature that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, long before dinosaurs walked the Earth. And now, with the discovery of stunningly detailed fossils in Morocco, paleontologists have finally ID’d the bizarre life-forms.
The creatures, known as stylophorans, looked like flattened and armored wall decorations that had a long arm poking off their sides. But while it was previously unclear where they fit in the animal family tree, the new study revealed that they are echinoderms, the ancient relatives of modern animals such as sea urchins, starfish, brittle stars, sea lilies, feather stars and sea cucumbers.

The finding was made possible thanks to fossils with “unequivocal evidence for exceptionally preserved soft parts, both in the appendage and in the body of stylophorans,” said study lead researcher Bertrand Lefebvre, a National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) researcher at the Laboratory of Geology of Lyon in France. [Photos: Trove of Marine Fossils Discovered in Morocco]

The incredible fossils were unearthed during an excavation in 2014 at the Fezouata Formation, located along the edge of the Sahara Desert in southern Morocco. The excavation yielded a bounty of fossils, including about 450 stylophoran specimens, each dating to about 478 million years ago.

But the researchers didn’t immediately realize that some of the fossils included preserved soft tissues. “It is only when we unpacked and looked at them under the binocular [microscope], back in the laboratory in Lyon, that we could see the soft parts,” Lefebvre told Live Science in an email. “Their presence and identification were then confirmed by SEM (scanning electron microscope) observations and analyses.”