Sink Your Teeth Into This Blog


Teeth and Fangs
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One of the rarest prizes discovered at Blue Beach, Nova Scotia Canada is this innocent-looking elongate bone. Along with the slab it was attached to, this is a portion of the lower jaw of a Basal Carboniferous tetrapod. It was the first tetrapod jaw ever found at Blue Beach. It was collected in 1999, loaned to colleagues in 2003 and still remains unreported.  For fifteen years this important find has been been buried in obscurity by scientists who haven't got around to describing all the fossils they have. We too are guilty of the same, because here at our small museum thousands of fossils have accumulated and there's over a hundred years worth of research awaits.

Tetrapod jaw fragment (about 1.5 cm long) with 3 marginal teeth spaced at regular intervals, a narrow dorsal shelf, and a conspicuously striated surface where the dentary encloses the meckelian element. All three of these traits indicate this is not a jaw that belonged to the big Blue Beach fish (Letognathus). By process of elimination we can thus assign it to the tetrapods, but can say very little more about it for now. Blue Beach and a few Scottish sites are producing the only tetrapod bones from the Tournaisian age.
...There are very few regions of the world in which fossils of the earliest land vertebrates (tetrapods: the first members of the group to which humans, along with other mammals, birds and reptiles ultimately derive) can be found.
These fossil are key to closing a gap in the fossil record that has existed for about 11 decades. This hiatus had denied scientists a deep understanding of how tetrapods lived and evolved their terrestrial adaptations....Dr. Jennifer A. Clack ScD FRS
Emeritus Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology University Museum of Zoology

Cambridge, United Kingdom

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