Many organisms that thrived and flourished on earth are no more in existence. If the do not exist today, how do we know that they existed once upon a time? We have read stories about mammoth, dinosaurs etc. but we haven’t seen them. The proof to their existence comes from a myriad of sources such as fossils, remains of bones and skeleton, phylogenetic studies, ancient scriptures etc. Fossils studies called paleobiology is based on the imprints of parts of organisms’ body on rocks.
However, astonishingly, a fossil had been found in Pennsylvania’s museum with full-body imprints of three ancient amphibians on sandstone. The results of their studies revealing the details about the fossil and organism were presented in Denver at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.
David Fillimore, a postgraduate student and Edward Simpson, a geology professor came across this fossil 2 years ago Mauch Chunk Formation footprints in a fossil collection at Pennsylvania’s Reading Public Museum. “We looked at each other and were speechless. ‘Its way beyond anything we could imagine finding,” Fillmore said.
The amphibians were a foot long, had webbed feet and smooth skin like the salamanders we know today. Lucas said,
They show you what the shape of the body was, they show you what the texture of the skin was like. These are things we don’t know from bones. They’re giving us new information about the anatomy of these long-extinct amphibians.
Their existence have been calculated to date back to 330 million years ago, which is about a 100 million years before dinosaurs existed. Making the presentation, Spencer G. Lucas of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science said,
They’re really some of the oldest body imprints of land-living amphibians.
These are only the immediate information that could be arrived at. More studies would be required to understand how this species has been banished and questons like why were there three amphibians close to each other on the same rock? what did they feed on? genetic basis etc. would require extensive research.
Via: msnbc
