Philippe Janvier — Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France Breaking through the mineral ceiling:
Early fossil vertebrate anatomy in the light of new technologies
Not exact matches
For her PhD, Viglietti studied the
fossil - rich sediments present in the Karoo, deposited during the tectonic events that created the Gondwanides, and found that the
vertebrate animals in the area started to either go extinct or become less common much
earlier than what was previously thought.
The belief in five digits as an ancestral character has even extended to
fossil reconstructions of Ichthyostega, one of the
earliest terrestrial
vertebrates from the Devonian (about 390 to 340 million years ago).
A tiny
fossil from China could be the
earliest of all deuterostomes, creatures that eventually led to evolution of all
vertebrates, including humans
Finds such as the newly discovered Birgeria species and the
fossils of other
vertebrates now show that so - called apex predators (animals at the very top of the food chain) already lived
early after the mass extinction.
The studies» analysis of sedimentary layers deposited with
early terrestrial
vertebrate fossils established that portions of our distant ancestors» environment dried out seasonally, but year - round much of it was, yep, a swamp.
A quarry in Strud, Belgium, that was excavated between 2004 and 2015 yielded
fossils of multiple species of placoderms, which are extinct, armored fish that represent some of the
earliest jawed
vertebrates on Earth.
All previous
fossil evidence for these
earliest known four - limbed
vertebrates has been found in river deltas and lakes.
Like lampreys, they are considered to be «living
fossils» similar to the
early relatives of
vertebrates that lived hundreds of millions of years ago.
Since the discovery of well - preserved
fossils of an
early Cretaceous sauropod dinosaur from Tanba in August 2006, our museum saff have been engaging themselves to excavation of dinosaur and other Cretaceous
vertebrate fossils from this and adjacent regions, as well as academic studies on the resultant materials.