More about the finding

Last week, the National Park Service (NPS) announced the discovery of “extremely rare” fossils of an extinct mammal relative that lived in North America 180 million years ago along the shifting shoreline of Lake Powell.

Researchers uncovered tritylodont bones by documenting fossilized tracks at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in southern Utah earlier this year. This area was often submerged and only accessible for short periods of time during the summer months before snowmelt filled the lake. The bones are the first tritylodont fossils found in the Navajo Sandstone.

• Tritylodonts were a species between reptiles and mammals, but biologically they were more similar to the former.
• They lived 252-145 million years ago during the Triassic and Jurassic periods.
• These warm-blooded herbivores likely coexisted with early mammals for millions of years and suffered a mass extinction at the end of the Triassic.
• Different types of tritylodonts It was the size of a mouse and a wolf.

The paleontologists who found the bones were in the right place at the right time. They have There were only 120 days for fossils to be uncovered before water levels rose again. They collected hundreds of pounds of rocks containing bones and skeletons that will be scanned and analyzed before joining the collections at the Museum of Prehistory in Price, Utah.

Lake Powell is often full of water / Photo unsplash

Studying these fossils will help paleontologists learn more about how early mammal relatives survived the mass extinction at the end of the Triassic and diversified during the Jurassic period.
– says the message.