BIG BONES
In June of 1988 I jotted down some notes about a sensational new find of fossils in a rock quarry in Iowa. The cache was estimated as having been 335-million years, Since that was sixteen years ago, those bones may already have turned up on “Road Show” or perhaps marketed several time on “e-Bay” as antiques. I have decided that if people will actually offer for sale and others will buy used chewing gum once belonging to Brittany Spears, they will buy old amphibian fossils.
One of the prize catches was an unnamed amphibian which looked like a six foot salamander. It can be touted as having one of the very first critters to forgo the warm aqua areas for the crusty terra firma side of the tropical setting which was common at that time in Iowa. It is said to have been the first swamp walker.
More than five hundred fossils of fish and amphibians were dug out of that quarry near a farming village named Delta, Iowa. And it was, in l988, the largest collection of land animals ever found from the Mississippian period which managed to sustain itself from 330 to 360 million years. Whole skeletons were found and the bones were in remarkable good condition. The bones were packed in limestone deposits
At the beginning of the M-era there were no birds, mammals, or reptiles on land. They which did make it to land living had to return to the water to spawn. The reptiles are said to be the first ones to go land-solo. The did so by laying eggs and there followed, after their example, a wide variety of reptiles, birds and strange mammals, some with overlapping ribs which were common to many versions of the era's water creatures.
The site was studied by experts from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago; William Penn College, Iowa; the University of Chicago, and National Geographic Society set its photographic expertize to work just after the discovery. Until that time, very few well preserved specimens of land vertebra had been found from those early times. In the 1970's a group from Cambridge University in England and Copenhagen, Denmark found a deposit of such bones in Greenland including several types of fish-like creatures not found in Iowa. They took 1500 pounds of 400-million year old bones home .
This is an especially interesting because mysterious changes occurred among the reptiles. The amphibians had been their ancestors and they took to the land. Then, came the birds came to soar through the skies, and a host of animals of many shapes, sizes and types evolved ...including human beings, in time.
A.L.M. October 5, 2004 [c452wds]
