Posted on 10/16/2020 10:20:54 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A peculiar, 220-million-year-old species of burrowing reptiles that evaded scientists has been found, fossilized. A team of National Park Service interns are credited with its discovery.
Hidden in a once-vibrant part of Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park, the burgeoning paleontologists unearthed fossils of the Skybalonyx skapter, an "anteater-like reptile" that probably predates dinosaurs, according to findings published this month in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. It's a new species of a reptile previously thought to only live in trees.
The unusual Skybalonyx skapter belongs to the group Drepanosaur, often considered the ugly duckling of reptiles (perhaps partly because they bore some resemblance to fowl in life). The University of California Museum of Paleontology describes the creature's features as "seemingly drawn at random from evolution's spare parts box," with bird-like beaks and tails punctuated with a claw, almost too oddly fantastical to be real.
But the Skybalonyx skapter was real, and it lived in an area that was once overrun with life during the Triassic Period some 220 million years ago, Xavier Jenkins, a Idaho State University PhD student who was credited with the Skybalonyx's discovery, told CNN.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
The CNN “writer” misses the days when the wild thesaurus roamed the earth.
Wonderful - can I borrow that?
This is fun, blaming Trump!! You don't need to think, just accuse. 😀 Now I know why Dems say Trump's fault! It's easier to say it than finding out what the problem is!
So much assumed, so little known.
They found fossils. How do they know the creatures were burrowers? They were certainly not “evading” the paleontologists. It’s nice how we can get a picture of these creases from a few mineralized remains, or can we?
Paleontology is like reading fictionalized history novels or watching an “historical” movie. It’s entertainment, not history.
Certainly.
Thanks for the pings!
Here are the other GGG topics introduced since the previous Digest ping:
Secret Service Codename: The Cryptkeeper
What are its stats? HP? AC?
Hearing this early “dinosaur” discribed, I wondered if it might actually have been a therapsid so looked at the original article. There I found another interesting article about a weird early mammal find that is 66 million years old.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/29/world/crazy-beast-ancient-mammal-scn/index.html
Mammal told me there’d be paleontological eras like these.
Damn you beat me to the Helen Thomas sighting reference
Curious critter.
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