PhD Student’s Stunning Fossil Puzzle Unlocks Mystery of a Lost Prehistoric Reptile Species
Now, this discovery opens the door to learning more about the diversity of animal life during the Jurassic Period.
Two Fossil Halves In Britain And Germany Are Reunited To Reveal Sphenodraco scandentis
Victor BeccariThe half of the fossil from the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Germany contains an outline of the creature’s skeleton.
PhD student Victor Beccari was studying a fossil at London’s Natural History Museum when he realized it looked familiar. It was stunningly similar to a fossil that Beccari had previously seen at the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany.
Turns out, the pair of fossils were two halves of the same whole. While it’s not uncommon to have two different fossil halves of a single specimen, it’s uncommon for these halves to be in different museums without anyone realizing that they belong together.
“It seems that someone in the 1930s decided to double their profit by selling both halves separately,” Beccari said in a statement from the museum. “As they didn’t tell either buyer that there was another half, the connection between the two fossils had been lost until now.”
The fossil was thought to be of a type of rhynchocephalian, a small reptile that roamed the Earth alongside the dinosaurs and other creatures in the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods.
Today, the only remaining species of rhynchocephalian is the tuatara in New Zealand.
However, further examination revealed that the creature was a species of rhynchocephalian that, before now, scientists had no idea existed.
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