Nov 20, 2024 07:56 PM
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth...alian-alps
EXCERPTS: A woman hiking in the Italian Alps discovered a fragment of a 280 million-year-old ecosystem, complete with footprints, plant fossils and even the imprints of raindrops, researchers have confirmed. [...] Scientists analyzed the rock and found that the footprints belong to a prehistoric reptile, raising questions about what other clues beyond Steffensen's "rock zero" were hiding in these Alpine heights.
[...] Experts subsequently visited the site multiple times and found evidence of an entire ecosystem dating back to the Permian period (299 million to 252 million years ago). The Permian was characterized by a fast-warming climate and culminated in an extinction event known as the "Great Dying," which wiped out 90% of Earth's species.
[...] "At that time, dinosaurs did not yet exist, but the animals responsible for the largest footprints found here must still have been of a considerable size," Cristiano Dal Sasso, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Milan who was the first expert contacted about the discovery, said in the statement.
The fossils offer a window into a fascinating, long-gone world whose inhabitants went extinct at the end of the Permian — but they can also teach us about the times we live in now, the researchers said in the statement... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: A woman hiking in the Italian Alps discovered a fragment of a 280 million-year-old ecosystem, complete with footprints, plant fossils and even the imprints of raindrops, researchers have confirmed. [...] Scientists analyzed the rock and found that the footprints belong to a prehistoric reptile, raising questions about what other clues beyond Steffensen's "rock zero" were hiding in these Alpine heights.
[...] Experts subsequently visited the site multiple times and found evidence of an entire ecosystem dating back to the Permian period (299 million to 252 million years ago). The Permian was characterized by a fast-warming climate and culminated in an extinction event known as the "Great Dying," which wiped out 90% of Earth's species.
[...] "At that time, dinosaurs did not yet exist, but the animals responsible for the largest footprints found here must still have been of a considerable size," Cristiano Dal Sasso, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Milan who was the first expert contacted about the discovery, said in the statement.
The fossils offer a window into a fascinating, long-gone world whose inhabitants went extinct at the end of the Permian — but they can also teach us about the times we live in now, the researchers said in the statement... (MORE - missing details)