The Fezouata Shale Formation has dramatically impacted our understanding of early Ordovician marine ecosystems before the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE), thanks to the abundance and quality of exceptionally preserved animals within. Systematic work has noted that the shelly fossil sub-assemblages of the Fezouata Shale biota are typical of open-marine deposits from the Lower Ordovician, but no studies have tested the quantitative validity of this statement. We extracted 491 occurrences of recalcitrant fossil genera from the Paleobiology Database to reconstruct 31 sub-assemblages, to explore the paleoecology of the Fezouata Shale and other contemporary, high-latitude (66°S – 90°S) deposits from the Lower Ordovician (485.4 Ma – 470 Ma) and test the interpretation that the Fezouata Shale biota is typical for an Ordovician open-marine environment. Sørensen’s dissimilarity metrics and Wilcoxon tests indicate that the sub-assemblages of the Tremadocian-aged lower Fezouata Shale are approximately 20 percent more heterogenous than the Floian-aged upper Fezouata Shale. Dissimilarity metrics and visualization suggests that while the lower Fezouata and upper Fezouata share faunal components, the two sections have distinct faunas. We find that the faunal composition of the lower Fezouata Shale is comparable with other Tremadocian-aged sub-assemblages from high latitudes, suggesting that it is typical for an early Ordovician open-marine environment. We also find differences in faunal composition between Tremadocian- and Floian-aged deposits. Our results corroborate previous field-based and qualitative systematic studies that concluded that the shelly assemblages of the Fezouata Shale are comparable with those of other Lower Ordovician deposits from high latitudes. This establishes the first quantitative baseline for examining the composition and variability within the assemblages of the Fezouata Shale which will be key to future studies attempting to discern the degree to which it can inform our understanding of marine ecosystems just before the start of the GOBE.

Script 1: Rstudio Script used to process and manipulate datasets, and to create visualizations and run statistical tests. 

Dataset 1: Early Ordovician occurence data downloaded from the paleobiological database (Early Ordovician PBDB). 

Dataset 2: Taxa from Dataset 1 that were categorized as either Biomineralizing or Conventional. The sheets labeled "Notes and Legend for Excel Docu" outlines the symbols used to delineate classification of taxonomic levels examined in all other sheets. The sheet labeled "Phyla Level" pertains to which metazoan phyla are biomineralizing, conventional, etc. The sheet labeled "Class Level" pertains to which metazoan classes are biomineralizing, conventional, etc. The sheet labeled "Order Level" pertains to which metazoan orders are biomineralizing, conventional, etc. The sheet labeled "Family Level" pertains to which metazoan families are biomineralizing, conventional, etc. The sheet labeled "Genera Level" pertains to which metazoan genera are biomineralizing, conventional, etc. Any cells containing "NA" result from no information at that taxonomic level in the Paleobiological Database.

Dataset 3: Presence-Absence Data for Conventional and Biomineralized Taxa within reconstructed time-averaged assemblages.