Although experts have yet to identify and catalog the animal, the find is entirely unusual. High school teacher Lisa St. Coeur Cormier has been the one who has discovered on the coast of Prince Edward Island (by Cape Egmont), located in eastern Canada, the fossil of this animal that would have lived about 300 million years ago. years.
The discovery was entirely accidental, as the 36-year-old teacher was walking her dog on the beach when she thought she saw a reddish branch or tree root sticking out of the sand. But not; He quickly identified that it was something else, a fossil, he realized, since an animal’s spine and an embedded skull were perfectly visible.
An extremely rare find
One of the experts who saw the first photographs taken by Coeur Cormier stated that the fossil appears to be from near the end of the Carboniferous and Permian periods, which places it about 300 million years ago; that is, before the Jurassic period, when dinosaurs roamed the earth about 200 million years ago. They became extinct about 65 million years ago due to a huge asteroid that crashed into Earth and left a huge crater known as the Chicxulub crater located northwest of the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico and dating from the Cretaceous extinction event. -Tertiary that gives name to the mass extinction of that time.
The truth is that we do not have many specimens from this period, which makes the find even more unusual than usual.
The creatures that roamed the Earth before the dinosaurs arrived were largely sharks, bony fish, arthropods, amphibians, reptiles, and synapsids. The fossil found on the beach is small, measuring just over half a meter , but it provides incredible details that allowed researchers to determine, first of all, that it lived long before the dinosaurs.
Laura MacNeil, a geologist who runs Prehistoric Island Tours, a company that offers tours of fossil sites on the island, was also involved in determining what to do with the fossil find. The goal was to safely remove the fossil from bedrock and place it in the hands of expert paleontologists.
Could it be a previously unknown species? Perhaps a reptile? We will still have to wait at least a year to see published the scientific study that elucidates the origin of this ancient species.
Very few pre-dinosaur fossils have been discovered, so the one on the beach could be an entirely new species.
The fossil has been carefully moved to a Greenwich facility that acts as a kind of paleontological repository. But from there it will be transferred to a paleontology laboratory to be seen and analyzed by experts.
Reference: CBC NEWS Canada
