A research team led by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, has filled a major gap in the state’s fossil record – describing the first known Jurassic vertebrate fossils from Texas.
• Discovery 150 million years ago
According to dailymail.co.uk, scientists have made the astonishing discovery of bone fragments from the limbs and spine, weathered over the years, of plesiosaurs, an extinct marine reptile that used to swim in the shallow sea that covered what is now northeastern Mexico and far West Texas The discovery is a window into the shallow sea that once covered the arid deserts of northeastern Mexico and western Texas 150 million years ago.
Researchers and scientists discovered the bones in the Malone Mountains in West Texas during two fossil-hunting missions led by Steve May, research associate at the University of Austin’s Jackson Museum of Earth Sciences in Austin.
The unearthed fossil is among the first Jurassic vertebrate fossils ever discovered and described in Texas. Prior to the discovery, the only Jurassic fossils collected and described from the Texas outcroppings were marine aquatic invertebrates, such as ammonites and snails. May says the new fossil finds are strong evidence that Jurassic bones are here.
“Jurassic vertebrates have been found there,” he says, noting that scientists have found some, “but there is more to discover that can tell the story of what this part of Texas was like during the Jurassic period.”
• The Jurassic era is a creative prehistoric era
According to news.utexas.edu, a paper describing the bones and other fossils was published in the journal Rocky Mountain Geology on June 23.
According to the paper, the Jurassic period was an iconic era of prehistory when giant dinosaurs walked the earth. However, the only reason we humans know about these creatures and other Jurassic life, is to discover the fossils or remains they left behind.
But to find Jurassic fossils, scientists need rocks from the Jurassic period, and because of Texas’ geological history, the state has hardly any outcrops from this time in Earth’s history.
You can learn about creatures from the Jurassic period by discovering a type of dinosaur that lived 201 million years ago
• How did the research begin?
In 2015, when a researcher at the Jackson Museum of Geosciences at Austin May University learned during his research that there were no Jurassic bones in the fossil record in Texas, he decided to go to the Malone Mountains to explore them. “You just don’t want to believe there are no Jurassic bones in Texas,” May tells the Daily Mail.
The search began when May discovered a tantalizing piece of evidence, a reference to large bone fragments mentioned in a 1938 paper by Claude Albriton, later a professor of geology at Southern Methodist University (SMU). about the geology of the Malone Mountains, and this evidence was enough to lead May and his collaborators to West Texas to see for themselves. Large bone fragments, as plesiosaurus fossils eroded and disintegrated.
It’s a start that could lead to more science, says co-author Louis Jacobs of the Daily Mail, professor emeritus at SMU.
“Geologists will go there looking for more bones.” “They will find them, and they will look for other things that interest them in their own ways.”
The Malone Mountains are reported to rise above the parched desert landscape. During the Jurassic period, sediments were deposited just below sea level, most likely miles from the shoreline. The Malone Mountains are west of Texas where there are very few Jurassic outcroppings. Most of them are in Malones.
