Rare discovery near Norton could help fill fossil gap, researchers say
A rare fossil discovery near Norton could help fill a key knowledge gap of how ancient creatures walked the Earth, according to researchers from the New Brunswick Museum.
Last summer, Olivia King and Matt Stimson were in the area, about 50 kilometres northwest of Saint John, looking for invertebrate tracks, when they stumbled upon fossilized footprints of a four-legged amphibian.
King said they immediately knew it was an important find.
"This is an area that researchers have been going over for ages to find evidence of these amphibians, whether it's bones or footprints or anything," said King, who's also a master's student in paleontology at St. Mary's University in Halifax.
"It was very exciting when we flipped over a rock and then another one, and we started finding all these footprints."
They found a "couple hundred" fossils, she said. Some were trackways, footsteps with a trailing tail, while others were a single firm impression.
The researchers described the amphibians as big salamanders that were 10 to 20 centimetres long with four toes in the front and five in the back.
Stimson said the fossils were 330 million to 360 million years old, when terrestrial vertebrate life made the transition from water to land. But it's a block of time where there's a fossil gap, known as Romer's Gap, and the find could provide plenty of fresh insight.
"They tell us something about the invasion of continental environments 350 million years ago," said Stimson, the assistant curator of geology at the museum and a PhD student at St. Mary's.
There are only two other known sites in the world — Scotland and Blue Beach, N.S. — where the fossils were preserved at the right age and environment, he said.
What separates the Norton site is that it's inland near freshwater. The other two are coastal and close to salt water.
"It also represents a whole new environment," Stimson said.
In Scotland, researchers excavated skeletons, he added.
"But they don't have the footprints and we do," he said, "and these footprints tell us a little bit about how the animals moved, how they walked and interacted with each other and their environments, which you can't get from a skeleton."
The researchers will continue to study the fossils to learn about the environment and ecology at the time.
