[5] Roderick Murchison first described the geological setting of Coalbrookdale Formation by which he gave the name Silurian in 1935, referring to the Silures, a Celtic tribe of Wales.

[7] The same year, the two men presented a joint paper, under the title "On the Silurian and Cambrian Systems, Exhibiting the Order in which the Older Sedimentary Strata Succeed each other in England and Wales",[8] which became the foundation of the modern geological time scale.

[9][10] In 1978, John M. Hurst, N. J. Hancock and William Stuart McKerrow determined the geological setting as Wenlock Group based on the distribution of brachiopod fossils collected from the surrounding areas.

In 1990, King spent summer vacation in Herefordshire and found tiny nodules in mineral cements (concretions) which he later cracked open to find fossils inside.

With the help of his twin brother Derek, a Silurian geology expert at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, he was able to identify arthropod with well-preserved limbs.

[13] The next year they sought assistance from Derek E. G. Briggs at the University of Bristol, an expert in fossil taxonomy, who joined their expedition from 1996.

[1][19] Fossils are mainly deposited in the upper outer shelf in the Welsh Basin, which was part of the Paleozoic microcontinent Avalonia in the southern subtropics.

[20] All major groups of invertebrates are found in three-dimensional and calcite in-fills within concretions in a marine volcaniclastic (bentonite) deposit.

[4][26] A variety of extinct animals have been recovered and described from it, including arthropods, polychaete worms, sponges, mollusks, echinoderms, lobopods and several unassigned specimens.

[5] The uniqueness of the fossil assemblage is that it is not only diverse, but also preserved in three-dimensional structure from which more details of the animal appearances could be deciphered.