WFS

Formation of sedimentary layers of white clay, Tamilnadu, India

Fossil site for wood fossils, Tamilnadu, India

Fossil site in Kerala, India

Fossil wood park maintained by geological survey of India at Tamilnadu

Cretaceous fossil sites india

Fossils in rack:-Cyad

Fossils in rack:-echiniderms

Fossils in rack:-Rastellum sp

Pre-historic seabed, Cretaceous period

Swimming reptiles make their mark in the Early Triassic

February 14th, 2015

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Vertebrate tracks provide valuable information about animal behavior and environments. Swim tracks are a unique type of vertebrate track because they are produced underwater by buoyant trackmakers, and specific factors are required for their production and subsequent preservation. Early Triassic deposits contain the highest number of fossil swim track occurrences worldwide compared to other epochs, and this number becomes even greater when epoch duration and rock outcrop area are taken into account.

This image shows a swim traceway from Capitol Reef National Park.
Credit: Tracy J. Thomson and Mary L. Droser, Geology, 5 Feb. 2015.

This spike in swim track occurrences suggests that during the Early Triassic, factors promoting swim track production and preservation were more common than at any other time. Coincidentally, the Early Triassic period follows the largest mass extinction event in Earth’s history, and the fossil record indicates that a prolonged period of delayed recovery persisted throughout this time period.

During this recovery interval, sediment mixing by animals living within the substrate was minimal, especially in particularly stressful environments such as marine deltas. The general lack of sediment mixing during the Early Triassic was the most important contributing factor to the widespread production of firm-ground substrates ideal for recording and preserving subaqueous trace fossils like swim tracks.

Source:Geological Society of America. “Swimming reptiles make their mark in the Early Triassic.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 9 February 2015. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150209143531.htm>.

15-million-year-old mollusk protein found

February 6th, 2015

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A team of Carnegie scientists have found “beautifully preserved” 15 million-year-old thin protein sheets in fossil shells from southern Maryland. Their findings are published in the inaugural issue of Geochemical Perspectives Letters.

The team–John Nance, John Armstrong, George Cody, Marilyn Fogel, and Robert Hazen–collected samples from Calvert Cliffs, along the shoreline of the Chesapeake Bay, a popular fossil collecting area. They found fossilized shells of a snail-like mollusk called Ecphora that lived in the mid-Miocene era–between 8 and 18 million years ago.

Ecphora is known for an unusual reddish-brown shell color, making it one of the most distinctive North American mollusks of its era. This coloration is preserved in fossilized remains, unlike the fossilized shells of many other fossilized mollusks from the Calvert Cliffs region, which have turned chalky white over the millions of years since they housed living creatures.

A 15-million year old fossil gastropod, Ecphora, from the Calvert Cliffs of southern Maryland is depicted. The golden brown color arises from the original shell-binding proteins and pigments preserved in the mineralized shell.
Credit: John Nance

Shells are made from crystalline compounds of calcium carbonate interleaved with an organic matrix of proteins and sugars proteins and sugars. These proteins are called shell-binding proteins by scientists, because they help hold the components of the shell together.They also contain pigments, such as those responsible for the reddish-brown appearance of the Ecphora shell. These pigments can bind to proteins to form a pigment-protein complex.

The fact that the coloration of fossilized Ecphora shells is so well preserved suggested to the research team that shell proteins bound to these pigments in a complex might also be preserved. They were amazed to find that the shells, once dissolved in dilute acid, released intact thin sheets of shell proteins more than a centimeter across. Chemical analysis including spectroscopy and electron microscopy of these sheets revealed that they are indeed shell proteins that were preserved for up to 15 million years.

“These are some of the oldest and best-preserved examples of a protein ever observed in a fossil shell,” Hazen said.

Remarkably, the proteins share characteristics with modern mollusk shell proteins. They both produce thin, flexible sheets of residue that’s the same color as the original shell after being dissolved in acid. Of the 11 amino acids found in the resulting residue, aspartate and glutamate are prominent, which is typical of modern shell proteins. Further study of these proteins could be used for genetic analysis to trace the evolution of mollusks through the ages, as well as potentially to learn about the ecology of the Chesapeake Bay during the era in which Ecphora thrived.

Courtesy: Carnegie Institution. “15-million-year-old mollusk protein found.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 5 February 2015. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150205083702.htm>.

NOW Explains Earth’s magnetic field

February 1st, 2015

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Earth’s magnetic field is crucial for our existence, as it shields the life on our planet’s surface from deadly cosmic rays. It is generated by turbulent motions of liquid iron in Earth’s core. Iron is a metal, which means it can easily conduct a flow of electrons that makes up an electric current. New findings from a team including Carnegie’s Ronald Cohen and Peng Zhang shows that a missing piece of the traditional theory explaining why metals become less conductive when they are heated was needed to complete the puzzle that explains this field-generating process. Their work is published in Nature.

The center of the Earth is very hot, and the flow of heat from the planet’s center towards the surface is thought to drive most of the dynamics of the Earth, ranging from volcanoes to plate tectonics. It has long been thought that heat flow drives what is called thermal convection — the hottest liquid becomes less dense and rises, as the cooler, more-dense liquid sinks — in Earth’s liquid iron core and generates Earth’s magnetic field. But recent calculations called this theory into question, launching new quests for its explanation.

This is a conception of Earth’s core overlaid by the electronic structure of iron; the width (fuzziness) of the lines results from the electron-electron scattering. Image courtesy of Ronald Cohen.
Credit: Ronald Cohen

In their work, Cohen and Zhang, along with Kristjan Haule of Rutgers University, used a new computational physics method and found that the original thermal convection theory was right all along. Their conclusion hinges on discovering that the classic theory of metals developed in the 1930’s was incomplete.

The electrons in metals, such as the iron in Earth’s core, carry current and heat. A material’s resistivity impedes this flow. The classic theory of metals explains that resistivity increases with temperature, due to atoms vibrating more as the heat rises. The theory says that at high temperatures resistivity happens when electrons in the current bounce off of vibrating atoms. These bounced electrons scatter and resist the current flow. As temperature increases, the atoms vibrate more, and increasing the scattering of bounced electrons. The electrons not only carry charge, but also carry energy, so that thermal conductivity is proportional to the electrical conductivity.

The work that had purportedly thrown the decades-old prevailing theory on the generation of Earth’s magnetic field out the window claimed that thermal convection could not drive magnetic-field generation. The calculations in those studies said that the resistivity of the molten metal in Earth’s core, which is generated by this electron scattering process, would be too low, and thus the thermal conductivity too high, to allow thermal convection to generate the magnetic field.

Cohen, Zhang, and Haule’s new work shows that the cause of about half of the resistivity generated was long neglected: it arises from electrons scattering off of each other, rather than off of atomic vibrations.

“We uncovered an effect that had been hiding in plain sight for 80 years,” Cohen said. “And now the original dynamo theory works after all!”

Journal Reference: Peng Zhang, R. E. Cohen, K. Haule. Effects of electron correlations on transport properties of iron at Earth’s core conditions. Nature, 2015; 517 (7536): 605 DOI: 10.1038/nature14090

Evolution: Rock sponges split up

January 27th, 2015

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A study led by researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich throws new light on the evolution of the so-called rock sponges, and reveals that conventional, morphology-based taxonomies do not accurately reflect the true genealogical relationships within the group.

Modern approaches to biological systematics have demonstrated that the evolutionary relationships between organisms can best be teased out by combining morphological analysis of fossil material with molecular genetic investigation of the genomes of living species. “This is a challenging task, particularly when fossil evidence is sparse, as in the case of most families of sponges,” says Professor Gert Wörheide of the Geobio-CenterLMU and LMU’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “The so-called rock sponges represent an exception to this rule insofar as they provide among the richest fossil record of sponges. With the aid of these fossils and the most comprehensive analysis yet carried out of gene sequences from extant species, an international team led by Wörheide has now reassessed the genealogy of the rock sponges — and show that, in many cases, traditional taxonomy does not correctly depict the evolutionary history of the group as a whole.

Rock sponges have a highly characteristic and extremely robust rock-like skeleton, which consists of barbed needles called spicules made of silicon dioxide (i.e., glass), which interlock to form a rigid network.

Credit: Professor Gert Wörheide

Rock sponges belong to the class Demospongiae, which account for the great majority of contemporary species assigned to the phylum Porifera. Demosponges are found in tropical, subtropical and temperate regions of the world’s oceans and occur at all depths from shallow reefs to abyssal depths. More than 300 extant species of rock sponges have been recognized, and classified into 41 genera that are assigned to 13 families. However, by comparison with the range of species represented in the fossil record, with over 300 genera comprising 34 families, the degree of diversity found in the contemporary demosponge fauna is comparatively modest. “The origins of modern rock sponges can be traced back over more than 500 million years into the Paleozoic, and this suggests that much more research will be needed before we understand their evolutionary history,” Wörheide adds.

Rock sponges have a highly characteristic and extremely robust rock-like skeleton, which consists of barbed needles called spicules made of silicon dioxide (i.e., glass), which interlock to form a rigid network. The form and structure of the skeletal elements provide some of the most important characters used to classify the rock sponges. “However, their precise classification and many aspects of their evolutionary history are still the subject of controversial debate,” says Astrid Schuster, a doctoral student in Wörheide’s group, who is first author of the new study. “Previous classifications were largely based on morphological similarities, and these led taxonomists to place many genera in the order ‘Lithistida‘, a dubious grouping which is still cited frequently in the literature,” she explains. With the aid of international colleagues, the team has now extended earlier molecular systematic studies and sequenced a specific pair of genes in each of 68 individual species of rock sponge, which had previously been assigned to 21 genera and 12 families. In addition, the team made use of previously reported gene sequences that were available in public databases.

The researchers correlated the molecular genetic results with characteristic features of the skeletal morphology, such as the type and configuration of the siliceous spicules. “The new findings refute some of the assumptions that have been made regarding the course of rock sponge evolution, and demonstrate that some species have been assigned to genera to which they do not actually belong,” says Schuster. Indeed, it is now abundantly clear that ‘Lithistida’ does not constitute a natural group, i.e., not all of its members can be derived from a direct common ancestor. In particular, the new work shows that classifications based on skeletal elements require thorough reassessment, because some of the different types of spicules that are characteristic for rock sponges arose, or were lost, several times independently during evolution. “So morphological similarities are not a reliable guide for the reconstruction of the genealogical relationships between these organisms,” Wörheide affirms, “and this is certainly also true of the other classes of sponge.”

The new study lays the groundwork for further investigations, in which the researchers will try to pinpoint the times at which the different sponge lineages diverged from one another. To do so, they will exploit the principle of the “molecular clock,” which reflects the fact that the extent of molecular divergence between sequences of the same (“homologous”) genes in any given pair of species provides a measure of the time elapsed since they diverged from one another. By dating divergence times, this strategy promises to enhance our understanding of sponge evolution, and should help to explain why Porifera are among the oldest groups of multicellular organisms still in existence.

Courtesy: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. “Evolution: Rock sponges split up.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 12 January 2015. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150112135622.htm>.

Geophysicists find reason for sudden tectonic plate movements

January 24th, 2015

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Yale-led research may have solved one of the biggest mysteries in geology — namely, why do tectonic plates beneath the Earth’s surface, which normally shift over the course of tens to hundreds of millions of years, sometimes move abruptly?

A new study published Jan. 19 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says the answer comes down to two things: thick crustal plugs and weakened mineral grains. Those effects, acting together, may explain a range of relatively speedy moves among tectonic plates around the world, from Hawaii to East Timor.

Of course, in this case “speedy” still means a million years or longer.

“Our planet is probably most distinctly marked by the fact that it has plate tectonics,” said Yale geophysicist David Bercovici, lead author of the research. “Our work here looks at the evolution of plate tectonics. How and why do plates change directions over time?”

Traditionally, scientists believed that all tectonic plates are pulled by subducting slabs — which result from the colder, top boundary layer of the Earth’s rocky surface becoming heavy and sinking slowly into the deeper mantle. Yet that process does not account for sudden plate shifts. Such abrupt movement requires that slabs detach from their plates, but doing this quickly is difficult since the slabs should be too cold and stiff to detach.

Yale-led research may have solved one of the biggest mysteries in geology — namely, why do tectonic plates beneath the Earth’s surface, which normally shift over the course of tens to hundreds of millions of years, sometimes move abruptly?
Credit: © Mopic / Fotolia

According to the Yale study, there are additional factors at work. Thick crust from continents or oceanic plateaux is swept into the subduction zone, plugging it up and prompting the slab to break off. The detachment process is then accelerated when mineral grains in the necking slab start to shrink, causing the slab to weaken rapidly.

The result is tectonic plates that abruptly shift horizontally, or continents suddenly bobbing up.

“Understanding this helps us understand how the tectonic plates change through the Earth’s history,” Bercovici said. “It adds to our knowledge of the evolution of our planet, including its climate and biosphere.”

The study’s co-authors are Gerald Schubert of the University of California-Los Angeles and Yanick Ricard of the Université de Lyon in France.

Dino-killing asteroid generated global firestorm ?

January 22nd, 2015

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Pioneering new research has debunked the theory that the asteroid that is thought to have led to the extinction of dinosaurs also caused vast global firestorms that ravaged planet Earth.

A team of researchers from the University of Exeter, University of Edinburgh and Imperial College London recreated the immense energy released from an extra-terrestrial collision with Earth that occurred around the time that dinosaurs became extinct. They found that the intense but short-lived heat near the impact site could not have ignited live plants, challenging the idea that the impact led to global firestorms.

These firestorms have previously been considered a major contender in the puzzle to find out what caused the mass extinction of life on Earth 65 million years ago.

The researchers found that close to the impact site, a 200 km wide crater in Mexico, the heat pulse — that would have lasted for less than a minute — was too short to ignite live plant material. However they discovered that the effects of the impact would have been felt as far away as New Zealand where the heat would have been less intense but longer lasting — heating the ground for about seven minutes — long enough to ignite live plant matter.

This is the fire propagation apparatus recreating the impact induced thermal pulse at the Cretaceous-Palaeogene (K-Pg) boundary. Halogen lamps are delivering the thermal radiation.
Credit: University of Exeter

The experiments were carried out in the laboratory and showed that dry plant matter could ignite, but live plants including green pine branches, typically do not.

Dr Claire Belcher from the Earth System Science group in Geography at the University of Exeter said: “By combining computer simulations of the impact with methods from engineering we have been able to recreate the enormous heat of the impact in the laboratory. This has shown us that the heat was more likely to severely affect ecosystems a long distance away, such that forests in New Zealand would have had more chance of suffering major wildfires than forests in North America that were close to the impact. This flips our understanding of the effects of the impact on its head and means that palaeontologists may need to look for new clues from fossils found a long way from the impact to better understand the mass extinction event.”

Plants and animals are generally resistant to localised fire events — animals can hide or hibernate and plants can re-colonise from other areas, implying that wildfires are unlikely to be directly capable of leading to the extinctions. If however some animal communities, particularly large animals, were unable to shelter from the heat, they may have suffered serious losses. It is unclear whether these would have been sufficient to lead to the extinction of species.

Dr Rory Hadden from the University of Edinburgh said: “This is a truly exciting piece of inter-disciplinary research. By working together engineers and geoscientists have tackled a complex, long-standing problem in a novel way. This has allowed a step forward in the debate surrounding the end Cretaceous impact and will help Geoscientists interpret the fossil record and evaluate potential future impacts. In addition, the methods we developed in the laboratory for this research have driven new developments in our current understanding of how materials behave in fires particularly at the wildland-urban-interface, meaning that we have been able to answer questions relating to both ancient mass extinctions at the same time as developing understanding of the impact of wildfires in urban areas today.”

The results of the study are published in the Journal of the Geological Society.

Courtesy: University of Exeter. “Doubt cast on global firestorm generated by dino-killing asteroid.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 22 January 2015. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150122084849.htm>.

Nundasuchus: A reptiles lived before dinosaurs

January 21st, 2015

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Finding a new species of dinosaur is pretty rare. Getting a hand in the discovery and naming of one — that’s rarer still.

Or it would be for anyone other than 32-year-old Sterling Nesbitt, an assistant professor of geological sciences in the College of Science and the newest addition to Virginia Tech’s paleontology team. Nesbitt has been responsible for naming more than half a dozen reptiles (including dinosaurs) in his young career.His latest addition to the paleontological vernacular is Nundasuchus, (noon-dah-suh-kis) a 9-foot-long carnivorous reptile with steak knifelike teeth, bony plates on the back, and legs that lie under the body.

Here is a representation of paleontologist Sterling Nesbitt’s latest addition to the paleontological vernacular: Nundasuchus, a 9-foot-long carnivorous reptile with steak knife-like teeth and bony plates on the back.
Credit: Virginia Tech

Nundasuchus is not a dinosaur, but one of the large reptiles that lived before dinosaurs took over the world.

“The full name is actually Nundasuchus songeaensis,” Nesbitt explained. “It’s Swahili mixed with Greek.”

The basic meaning of Nundasuchus, is “predator crocodile,” “Nunda” meaning predator in Swahili, and “suchus” a reference to a crocodile in Greek.

“The ‘songeaensis’ comes from the town, Songea, near where we found the bones,” Nesbitt said. “The reptile itself was heavy-bodied with limbs under its body like a dinosaur, or bird, but with bony plates on its back like a crocodilian.”

The new, albeit ancient, reptile, is featured online in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“We discovered the partial skeleton in 2007 when I was a graduate student, but it took some years to piece the bones together as they were in thousands of pieces,” Nesbitt said.

Although a large number of skeleton bones were found, most of the skull was not recovered despite three trips to the site and more than 1,000 hours spent painstakingly piecing the bones back together and cleaning them. Nundasuchus was found in southwestern Tanzania, while Nesbitt and a team of researchers were looking for prehistoric relatives of birds and crocodiles, but not really expecting to find something entirely new.

“There’s such a huge gap in our understanding around the time when the the common ancestor of birds and crocodilians was alive — there isn’t a lot out there in the fossil record from that part of the reptile family tree,” Nesbitt said. “This helps us fill in some gaps in reptile family tree, but we’re still studying it and figuring out the implications.”

The find itself was a bit of a “eureka moment” for the team. Nesbitt said he realized very quickly what he had found.

“Sometimes you know instantly if it’s new and within about 30 seconds of picking up this bone I knew it was a new species,” he said. “I had hoped to find a leg bone to identify it, and I thought, This is exactly why we’re here’ and I looked down and there were bones everywhere. It turns out I was standing on bones that had been weathering out of the rock for hundreds of years — and it was all one individual of a new species.”

Nesbitt says he has been very lucky to put himself in the right position for finding bones, but it also takes a lot of work doing research on what has been found in various locations through previous research; what type of animals were known to inhabit certain areas; and research into the geological maps of areas to determine the most likely places to find fossils.

Nesbitt has been involved in naming 17 different reptiles, dinosaurs, and dinosaur relatives in the last 10 years, including seven of which he discovered.

Citation: Virginia Tech. “Paleontologist names a carnivorous reptile that preceded dinosaurs.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 20 January 2015. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150120085619.htm>.

Purgatorius, an early primate

January 20th, 2015

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Earth’s earliest primates have taken a step up in the world, now that researchers have gotten a good look at their ankles.

A new study has found that Purgatorius, a small mammal that lived on a diet of fruit and insects, was a tree dweller. Paleontologists made the discovery by analyzing 65-million-year-old ankle bones collected from sites in northeastern Montana.

Purgatorius, part of an extinct group of primates called plesiadapiforms, first appears in the fossil record shortly after the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs. Some researchers have speculated over the years that primitive plesiadapiforms were terrestrial, and that primates moved into the tree canopy later. These ideas can still be found in some textbooks today.

“The textbook that I am currently using in my biological anthropology courses still has an illustration of Purgatorius walking on the ground. Hopefully this study will change what students are learning about earliest primate evolution and will place Purgatorius in the trees where it rightfully belongs,” said Stephen Chester, the paper’s lead author. Chester, who conducted much of the research while at Yale University studying for his Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Chester is also a curatorial affiliate at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Fossil ankles show that Purgatorius, an early primate, lived in trees.
Credit: Patrick Lynch/Yale University

Until now, paleontologists had only the animal’s teeth and jaws to examine, which left much of its appearance and behavior a mystery. The identification of Purgatorius ankle bones, found in the same area as the teeth, gave researchers a better sense of how it lived.

“The ankle bones have diagnostic features for mobility that are only present in those of primates and their close relatives today,” Chester said. “These unique features would have allowed an animal such as Purgatorius to rotate and adjust its feet accordingly to grab branches while moving through trees. In contrast, ground-dwelling mammals lack these features and are better suited for propelling themselves forward in a more restricted, fore-and-aft motion.”

The research provides the oldest fossil evidence to date that arboreality played a key role in primate evolution. In essence, said the researchers, it implies that the divergence of primates from other mammals was not a dramatic event. Rather, primates developed subtle changes that made for easier navigation and better access to food in the trees.

The research appears in the Jan. 19 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ancient fossils reveal rise in parasitic infections due to climate change

January 18th, 2015

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When seeking clues about the future effects of possible climate change, sometimes scientists look to the past. Now, a paleobiologist from the University of Missouri has found indications of a greater risk of parasitic infection due to climate change in ancient mollusk fossils. His study of clams from the Holocene Epoch (that began 11,700 years ago) indicates that current sea level rise may mimic the same conditions that led to an upsurge in parasitic trematodes, or flatworms, he found from that time. He cautions that an outbreak in human infections from a related group of parasitic worms could occur and advises that communities use the information to prepare for possible human health risks.

Trematodes are internal parasites that affect mollusks and other invertebrates inhabiting estuarine environments, which are the coastal bodies of brackish water that connect rivers and the open sea. John Huntley, assistant professor of geological sciences in the College of Arts and Science at MU, studied prehistoric clam shells collected from the Pearl River Delta in China for clues about how the clams were affected by changes caused from global warming and the resulting surge in parasites.

“Because they have soft bodies, trematodes do not leave body fossils,” Huntley said. “However, infected clam shells develop oval-shaped pits where the clam grew around the parasite in order to keep it out; the prevalence of these pits and their makeup provide clues to how the clams adapted to fight trematodes. When compared to documented rises in sea level more than 9,300 years ago, we found that we currently are creating conditions for an increase in trematodes in present-day estuarine environments. This could have harmful implications for both animal and human health, including many of the world’s fisheries.”

This image shows the following: (A) Whole specimen from sample 154 with shallow pits; (B) Partial specimen from sample 154 with deep pits; (C) Partial specimen from sample 157 displaying pits on multiple growth layers; and (D) Incipient steinkern from sample 162 displaying pits preserved as positive relief on lower half of specimen.
Credit: John Warren Huntley

Modern-day trematodes will first infest mollusks like clams and snails, which are eaten by shore birds and mammals including humans. Symptoms of infection in humans range from liver and gall bladder inflammation to chest pain, fever, and brain inflammation. The infections can be fatal. At least 56 million people globally suffer from one or more foodborne trematode infections, according to the World Health Organization.

Huntley and his team compared these findings to those from his previous study on clams found in the Adriatic Sea. Using data that includes highly detailed descriptions of climate change and radiocarbon dating Huntley noticed a rising prevalence of pits in the clam shells, indicating a higher prevalence of the parasites during times of sea level rise in both the fossils from China and Italy.

“By comparing the results we have from the Adriatic and our new study in China, we’re able to determine that it perhaps might not be a coincidence, but rather a general phenomenon,” Huntley said. “While predicting the future is a difficult game, we think we can use the correspondence between the parasitic prevalence and past climate change to give us a good road map for the changes we need to make.”

Source: Science daily : John Warren Huntley, Franz T. Fürsich, Matthias Alberti, Manja Hethke, Chunlian Liu. A complete Holocene record of trematode–bivalve infection and implications for the response of parasitism to climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014; 111 (51): 18150 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1416747111

Fossil found by boy fills gap in reptile evolution

January 14th, 2015

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A fossil of a lizard-like creature found by a boy on a Prince Edward Island beach is a new species and the only reptile in the world ever found from its time, 300 million years ago, a new study shows.

The fossilized species has been named Erpetonyx arsenaultorum after the family of Michael Arsenault of Prince County, P.E.I., who found the fossil at Cape Egmont, said a study published this week in the Proceedings of Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

“Our animal is the only reptile known from this time period called the Gzhelian,” said Sean Modesto, a paleontologist at Cape Breton University who was the lead author of the new paper about the fossil, now in the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. He collaborated with researchers at the ROM, University of Toronto at Mississauga, and the Smithsonian Institution.

The new ancient reptile has been named Erpetonyx arsenaultorum after the family of Michael Arsenault of Prince County, P.E.I., who found the fossil on a beach when he was a young boy. (Courtesy Sean Modesto/Cape Breton University)

‘They built a box and Michael kept it under his bed for many years. He knew it was very valuable.’— Bette Sheen, family friend of Michael Arsenault

The Gzhelian Age was a five-million-year span that started about 304 million years ago, just 10 million years after the first reptiles appeared.

Erpetonyx helps fill a big gap in the fossil record, revealing that there were nearly twice as many kinds of reptiles living around that time as scientists previously believed, Modesto said.

At the time that Erpetonyx lived, P.E.I. was located on the equator and its home was likely a tropical forest.

The animal was about 25 centimetres long — about the size of a chameleon — and would have looked like an average modern-day lizard, even though it isn’t closely related to them. Its sharp, peg-like teeth showed it likely ate insects and small amphibians rather than plants.

“Anything that it could catch or stuff down its throat it probably ate,” said Modesto.

Source:Article By By Emily Chung, CBC News