Egg-laying land dweller, similar remains had never been found in that area: could be of a new animal species the fossil found in Utah
It’s not often that we discover a new animal species, especially if all we have to identify it is written on rocks. But it may have happened in the United States, in Canyonlands National Park in Utah, where a fossil has been found that may be the first of a species never seen before.
What we know about the new fossil
Archaeologists are still studying to figure out the exact species and classification of the fossil, but they have found that it is a tetrapod, meaning it walked on four legs, and that it could be an ancestor of reptiles or mammals. It was certainly an egg-laying land-dweller. It can be dated to between 295 and 305 million years ago, between the Pennsylvanian and Permian geological periods.
The skeleton found is intact, which bodes well for the advancement of research: the bones were even in the same position that the animal had when it was alive. This perfect preservation will help paleontologists analyze the evolution of amniotes (the animals that lay eggs) and the ancestors of mammals and reptiles. “This is a very important discovery,” explains the paleontologist leading the project, Adam Marsh. “Because it could mean that there are other fossils of this type out there.”
Search in Utah National Park
No fossils of that type had ever been discovered in that area of Canyonlands National Park – so archaeologists are inclined to believe it’s a new species, as was the case recently in New Zealand.
The team in charge of the research has been busy a whole day to dig the rock and then bring the skeleton back to the valley – before it was also at risk of erosion due to the rains: now it is in the laboratory, where it will undergo the various tests to determine what species it belongs to.
It will take at least a year, and then it will be exhibited in a museum. Even if it does not turn out to be a species never seen before, it would still be an important discovery because it would tell a lot about the ecosystem of that area of Utah in the past millennia: the fossils found there in fact were all of aquatic animals, and for the first time was found an old inhabitant of the mainland.
Recently another desert of the American continent has experienced a series of important geological discoveries: it is the Atacama, in Chile, where they were found the remains of a “flying dragon”.