FOSSILS INDICATE ICE AGE MANATEES NEAR TEXAS

 Fossil proof suggests manatees along the Texas coast going back to one of the most current ice age.


Today, manatees do not live year-round in Texas, but these mild, slow-moving sea cows are known to sometimes visit, swimming in for a "summer holiday" from Florida and Mexico and going back to warmer waters for the winter.


The exploration increases questions about whether manatees have been production the visit for thousands of years, or if an old populace of ice age manatees once called Texas home someplace in between 11,000 and 240,000 years back.


jenis dan tipe permainan slot game

The searchings for show up in Palaeontologia Electronica.


"This was an unexpected point for me because I do not consider manatees getting on the Texas coast today," says lead writer Christopher Bell, a teacher at the College of Texas at Austin's Jackson Institution of Geosciences. "But they're here. They're simply not popular."


The paper coauthors are curator William Godwin, SHSU alumna Kelsey Jenkins (currently a finish trainee at Yale University), and SHSU Teacher Patrick Lewis.


The 8 fossils explained in the paper consist of manatee jawbones and rib pieces from the Pleistocene, the geological epoch of the last ice age. Amateur fossil collection agencies found most of the bones from McFaddin Coastline close to Port Arthur and Caplen Coastline close to Galveston throughout the previous half a century. The collection agencies contributed their discovers to the Sam Houston Specify College All-natural Background Collections.


"We have them from one years to another, so we understand it is not from some old manatee that cleaned up, and we have them from various places," says William Godwin, curator of those collections. "All these lines of proof support that manatee bones were turning up in a continuous way."


A reduced jawbone fossil, which amateur collection agency Joe Liggio contributed, jumpstarted the research.


"I decided my collection would certainly be better offered in a gallery," Liggio says. "The manatee jaw was among many unidentified bones in my collection."


Manatee jawbones have a unique S-shaped contour that instantly captured Godwin's eye. But Godwin says he was consulted with suspicion when he looked for various other manatee fossils for contrast. He remembers getting to bent on a fossil vendor that informed him point-blank "there are no Pleistocene manatees in Texas."


But evaluation of the fossils by Bell and Lewis shows or else. The bones come from the same species of manatee that visits the Texas coast today, Trichechus manatus. A top jawbone contributed by US Agent Brian Babin was found to come from an vanished form of the manatee, Trichechus manatus bakerorum.


Popular posts from this blog

FOSSILS BUST MYTH ABOUT MAMMALS IN DINOSAUR AGE

FOSSILS REVEAL AUSTRALIA’S 600-POUND KANGAROO, 20-FOOT LIZARD

MUSEUM FOSSILS REVEAL NEW DOLPHIN-ISH REPTILE