An incredible discovery was made in
Arizona, United States
.
The team of scientists from
the Virginia Institute of Technology
discovered
fossil remains of Triassic caecilians
, they are the oldest of the amphibians and
could help to understand the amphibians that inhabit today
.
According to the study published by
Nature
, the records of small vertebrates are capable of "modifying the paleontological knowledge of our history," according to the article.
Until now, the oldest fossils of this species of amphibians were those from the Lower Jurassic, dating from 183 million years ago, although evolutionary DNA analyzes suggested that they already existed in the Carboniferous or Permian, between 370 and 270 years ago. millions of years.
This gap "of at least 87 million years" in the records could have been closed, celebrates
Ben Kligman
, one of the discoverers of these new fossil remains, found in 2019 in the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona and which he has baptized to the creature as Funcusvermis gilmorei.
How are the caecilians?
The caecilians date on earth for more than 180 million years.
The current caecilians are amphibians with subterranean habits that only live in tropical regions derived from the fragmentation of the supercontinent Gondwana
(South America, Africa, India, Seychelles and Southeast Asia)
.
Their anatomy is adapted to life underground, which is why they lack limbs, have an elongated body, whose size ranges from 10 centimeters to a meter and a half, and have rudimentary or atrophied eyes.
"Fossils of caecilians are extraordinarily rare, and are discovered accidentally when paleontologists are looking for fossils of other, more common mammals. Our finding was totally unexpected," Kligman explains in a statement.
It specifies that Funcusvermis was found in a stratum about 220 million years old in the Petrified Forest, when present-day Arizona was located near the Equator, in a hot and humid climate zone.
According to the expert, this animal shares skeletal characteristics closer to the first fossil remains of amphibian relatives, such as frogs and salamanders, which reinforces the evidence of a shared origin and a close evolutionary relationship between caecilians and these two groups.
"Unlike modern caecilians, Funcusvermis lacks many adaptations associated with the ability to burrow, indicating a slower acquisition of characteristics linked to a subterranean lifestyle early in its evolution," Klingman observes.
Since the first find of remains in 2019, experts have recovered more fossils, including 70 lower jaws, several upper jaws, a vertebra and a part of a lower limb, making this site the "most abundant ever discovered." ".
Although they have not managed to form a complete skeleton to determine the exact size of the animal, they emphasize that from the lower jaw, about six millimeters long, those caecilians were "tiny."
A funky little "worm," jokes Klingman, who has Latinized the genus and species name of his Funcusvermis gilmorei after, respectively, the Ohio Players song "Funky Worm" (1972) and the paleontologist Ned Gilmore, an "important mentor" to him.
As reported
by EFE.
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