This biota is preserved in certain strata within the Brandon Bridge Formation, which dates to the early Silurian period.

[1][2][3] This biota is one of the few well studied Lagerstätten (exceptional fossil sites) from the Silurian, making it important in our understanding of the period's biodiversity.

[1][4][3] The exceptional preservation of the fossils of the Waukesha Biota thus provides a window to a significant portion of Silurian life that otherwise may have been undetected and therefore unknown to science.

[3] Most of the Waukesha Biota is preserved within a 12 cm (4.7 in) layer of thinly-laminated, fine-grained, shallow marine sediments of the Brandon Bridge Formation consisting of mudstone and dolomite deposited in a sedimentary trap at the end of an erosional scarp over the eroded dolomites of the Schoolcraft and Burnt Bluff Formations.

The Franklin fossils were from blasted material apparently originating from a horizon and setting equivalent to that of the Waukesha site.

The taphonomy of the Waukesha Biota is unusual in preserving few of the kinds of animals that typically dominate the Silurian fossil record, including in other strata of the same two quarries.

Fossils of corals, echinoderms, brachiopods, bryozoans, gastropods, bivalves, and cephalopods are rare or absent from the Waukesha Biota, although trilobites are diverse and common.

A wide variety including crustaceans, trilobites, chelicerates, and less familiar groups like thylacocephalans, cheloniellids and marrellomorphs are known.