Researchers have discovered fossilized skin that they say is the oldest ever found.
The crocodile-like skin, at least 286 million years old, was preserved in an ancient filled cave in present-day Oklahoma. The discovery could help unravel the secrets of evolution, and is important evidence from the time when some animals were transitioning to life on land.
“Finding such an ancient skin fossil represents an extraordinary opportunity to look into the past and see what the skin of some of these early animals looked like,” said Ethan Mooney, a graduate student at the University of Toronto and lead author of the book. The newspaper said in a press release.
The discovery was published on Thursday In the scientific journal Current Biology, was made in a quarry and cave system called Richards Spur. Researchers believe that the animals fell into the cave system and were preserved by oil and tar that seeped into and coated them.
The skin is a 3D cast with some fossilized tissue attached.
“There are very few cases of Paleolithic land animals that preserved their skin,” said Paul Olsen, a paleontologist and professor at Columbia University who was not involved in the study. “That's one of the reasons why this is so important.”
The preserved skin was found at a site with many fossils of lizard-like creatures called captorinus agouti, But it was not clearly linked to a specific skeleton.
Olsen said the skin could help solve mysteries about how reptiles and mammals split from each other in evolutionary history. The two branches of life share a common ancestor.
“They hypothesize that reptilian-like skin existed in the common ancestor of reptiles and mammals, but they can't actually prove that with their existing material because their reptilian-like skin is not related to the skeleton,” Olsen said of the authors. “The site could reveal this in the future.”
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