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The coelacanth genus can still be found in Indonesian waters.
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Nationalgeographic.co.id—A team of paleontologists from the Natural History Museum, Geneva, reports the discovery of these fossils.fish fossil Coelacanth who live in the time of Kapur in Texas. The fossils are estimated to be around 96 million years old and include coelacanth mawsoniid from the time of Kapur The beginning of North America.
Isolated bone from a fish called coelacanth The mawsoniid was found in the Woodbine Cenomanian Formation in northeastern Texas. The findings have been published in the journal PLoS ONE dengan judul “The first late cretaceous mawsoniid coelacanth (Sarcopterygii: Actinistia) from North America: Evidence of a lineage of extinct ‘living fossils’”.
The collector and Bradley Carter from Texas, who made the discovery, donated the bones to Southern Methodist University (SMU) Shuler Paleontology Museum for analysis. Lionel Cavin of the Department of Geology and Paleontology at the Natural History Museum, Geneva in Switzerland led the research.
The research also collaborated with Pablo Torino, Paleontologist and Museologist from the Universidad de la República, Nathan Van Vranken from the STEM Division from Potomac State College, Bradley Carter who is an independent researcher. Next is research partner Michael J. Polcyn, who is director of SMU’s Digital Earth Sciences Laboratory and finally Date Winkler, who is co-author and director of the Shuler Museum of Paleontology.
To note, coelacanths are a group of large lobe-finned fish (sarcopterygians) that are closely related to tetrapods. They are thought to have become extinct 66 million years ago. Until then the first living specimen was caught by chance in South Africa in 1938.
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“Until less than 100 years ago, a distinctive group of fish called coelacanths was once thought to be extinct alongside the dinosaurs. However, living members were discovered in deep water in the 1930s,” said Dale Winkler, a research professor at Southern Methodist University in the Department of Huffington Earth Sciences in a release.
He said, in this research report, it is reported that a new fossil specimen from Texas, was discovered by a talented local fossil enthusiast. “(This is) important because they belong to a group of large coelacanths known primarily from South America and Africa, and have never been found before in Cretaceous North America,” Winkler said.
The coelacanth fish first appeared in the Early Devonian period. It then diversified slightly in the Devonian and Carboniferous, and reached maximum diversity in the Early Triassic.
During the Cretaceous, they were only known in two families, Latimeriidae, which survived to this day in the genus Latimeria, and Mawsoniidae, which became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous.
“Currently, the only living coelacanth genus, Latimeria is represented by two species along the east coast of Africa and in Indonesia,” said Dr. Lionel Cavin told Scie News. Cavin is a paleontologist from the Department of Geology and Paleontology at the Natural History Museum, Geneva.
Also Read: New Study: Ancient Coelacanth Fish Can Live Up To 100 Years
Zubin Erik Dutta.
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Reconstruction of Mawsonia sp. roamed the brackish or freshwater coastal environments of Texas during the Cenomaniac period from the Cretaceous.
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Cavin said the sarcopterygian fish was dubbed a ‘living fossil’, in particular because of its slow evolution. The large geographical distribution of Latimeria may be the reason for the great resistance to extinction of this lineage. “But the lack of a fossil record for this genus held us back from testing this hypothesis,” Cavin said.
Newly described coelacanth specimens were recovered from two locations of the Woodbine Formation in northeastern Texas. They belong to a previously unknown species of mawsoniid coelacanth in the genus Mawsonia.
This fish that lives in brackish waters has a total body length of 1.5 m or about 4.9 feet and lived during the Late Cretaceous, about 96 million years ago. “The discovery of Mawsonia sp. adds an important new component to the Woodbine vertebrate fauna,” the paleontologist said.
According to the researchers, this is an unexpected Gondwanian representative in this Appalachian assemblage with a Laurasian (European and Asian) dominant affinity. “This greatly increases the geographic distribution of this genus, and confirms its early Late Cretaceous appearance,” the researchers said.
Also Read: Madagascar May Be A Secret Fortress For ‘Living Fossils’ Coelacanth
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