Life A handful of plankton fossils buried in a small chunk of rock show that the oceans were teeming with life before the Late Ordovician mass extinction, the second most severe on record Facebook / Meta Twitter / X icon Linkedin Reddit Email One of the radiolarian fossils found inside the rock sample Courtesy of Jonathan Aitchison A tiny pellet of ancient rock, a mere half the size of a grain of rice, has yielded 20 microscopic fossils representing eight different species, including one that is entirely new to science. The discovery will enhance our understanding of the second-largest known mass extinction . It also shows how new analytical techniques are unlocking parts of the fossil record that have previously gone overlooked. Jonathan Aitchison at the University of Queensland, Australia, and his colleagues extracted the pellet from a rock that was collected in late 2018 from the Sichuan basin in China, about 300 kilometres south of Xian.…