On a warm and sunny July day, the paleontologist Melina Jobbins and her team look in an old rock quarry near Lundar, Man., For fossils of 390 million years of an extinct fish that swam in what was once a vast inner sea.
Jobbins, a postdoctoral fellow at the Paleosed+ Laboratory in the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Manitoba, extends a geological map on the hood of its rental car to confirm what it was from history can expect to find fossils in this area, now part of the Canadian prairies.
“All orange is devonic,” says Kirstin Brink, another paleontologist at the University of Manitoba. The devonic period is nicknamed the age of the fish, Jobbins explains to a CBC reporter.
This area is where, in the 1990s, researchers from the University of Manitoba discovered some old fossils.
They were not very sure of what they had found, but Jobbins studied them, they found some more fossils and realized that it was a new discovery, one of the first fish to develop body armor, a jaw and teeth.
Jobbins renamed and reclassified the fish as The Lundarensiscalled for the Point Elm formation, the formation of rocks in which it was found. His research was published in the July edition of the Journal of Systematic Paleontology.
The remains of this fish are approximately 150 million years older than dinosaurs and only about 1½ meters long, the size of a large Chinook salmon.
“We hope to look for more of these fish and more placoderms, more than Elmo and its relatives too,” he said.
Jobbins pointed to teeth, an eye and other characteristics of fossils in the collection of the Museum of Geological Sciences of the University.
The fish have an armor made of dermal bone on the head and thorax, but the rest of the skeleton is made of cartilage, similar to sharks.
“This makes them a very important group to understand the origin of the bone and the early evolution of the bone too,” Jobbins said.
“Also the jaws itself, because this is one of the first fish to develop the jaws in the first place, and in addition to the teeth. They come hand in hand. So understanding how it evolved, how it originated, how we have something like what we have today, which is at another level of complexity.”
Jobbins and his team are visiting more quarries this summer, hoping to find more fossils and answer more questions: how was the animal, but also its environment and what were the conditions for the evolution of these characteristics.
“We can understand much more than what was present at that time and how diverse … what is incredible.”
Manitoba is known for his fossil record, largely in the discovery Fossil Canadian Discovery in Morden, man. The Tyndall stone of the province has preserved fossils of the world’s largest mosasaurs, the marine reptiles of the Cretaceous period.
While the paleontologist Brink rushed to the rocks, pointing to coral fossils and sponges and relatives of the sea star, he explained that Manitoba is a great place to find fossils because many different ages of rock are preserved.
“We can see how life has changed through all these different periods of time.”
Many of the rocks have been unearthed because mining “only exposed all these fossils by accident, which is really good for us paleontologists,” Brink said.
On this day, they found many fossils, including some that will use to teach students in autumn, but unfortunately, The Lundarensis It was elusive. They will try again at another time.
Even so, Virgil Johnson, the Reeve of the Rural Municipality of Coldwell that helped them access the quarries, was delighted.
Johnson grew here and spent a lot of time in the quarries.
“We used to find all these little fossils when we were crawling here and going to swim and those things, so it was actually quite good that when you get experts here and show you exactly how old they were and what they are,” he said.
“It’s very exciting.”
A paleontologist at the University of Manitoba has unearthed a new classification of old fish. The researchers believe that the fish swam 390 million years ago in what was once a vast inner sea.
