An incredible discovery has been made by an amateur paleontologist from Arizona while taking part in a dig held last month at Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park. Stephanie Leco, the amateur paleontologist behind the discovery, found the jaw-bone of a Saurichthys, a beaked fish. She declared that the park routinely turns up fossils of the dinosaurs.
The fossil discovered is about the same size of a pinky fingernail. The site of the discovery was a lake or pond during the Late Triassic period, called the Petrified Forest. According to Leco, the beaked fish was thought to be already extinct in North America at that period. Scientists believed that the related fish was present in the world about 10 million years earlier, in the Early Triassic period. So far, the fossils of fish dating from the Late Triassic were found only in China, according to the park paleontologist Bill Parker.
Leco said that she already had several small teeth in her collection. While she was marveling at the tibia of a plant-lizard found by another digger, she came across the jaw bone. Since she was not sure at first what it was, she decided to hand it to the park's lead fossil preparer, Matt Smith. Smith as well, had no idea about the find.
The two took the bone to the lab, to be studied more closely under a microscope, according to Leco. The park emailed her later to announce that it was a fish closely related to the genus Saurichthys.
The amateur paleontologist hit a jackpot with her discovery of a jaw bone from the long-snouted fish known to exist more than 220 million years ago. She was part of the first dig for citizens held at the national park near Holbrook last month. The park paleontologist Bill Parker declared that from now on people who study this group of fish might start setting their sights in the direction of their park.
Leco, aged 26 now, said she developed an even deeper fascination with paleontology since her discovery and even bought a couple of books on the Triassic period. The respective period started about 250 million years ago and lasted for 50 million years. It is an important era for paleontologists because it followed the largest extinction of life on Earth. At that time on Earth were walking the first dinosaurs and the land mass was a single continent.
The fossil Leco discovered is about three times smaller than the full jaw of the fish, according to Parker. He also declared that other fossils of the fish might be found in the future on the East Coast and on the Colorado Plateau.
A senior at the Berkley University of California, Ben Kligman has been studying the pond site preserved in a six-inch layer of rock. He declared that he has plans to return to Petrified Forest next summer and search for a full fossil of the fish in order to determine whether or not it's a new species. However, since Leco found the jaw bone he discovered that he too already had smaller pieces of the fish that he couldn't identify as such before.
