Most of us know the Arizona landscape is ancient, but not everyone is aware of just how far back it dates. A report recently came out discussing the discovery of 313-million year-old fossils in the Grand Canyon, and it’s truly incredible. Here’s what researchers found:
The canyons that make up our state’s most iconic natural wonder date to about 70 million years ago. For this reason, it’s only natural to assume fossils are hiding all throughout the park.
Facebook/Grand Canyon National Park
In 2016, a geology professor stumbled upon the oldest fossils ever discovered in the Grand Canyon. At 313-million years old, the creatures they immortalize existed long before the canyon ever did!
Facebook/Grand Canyon National Park
Allan Krill, a visiting professor from Norway at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, made the discovery.
Google/Matthew Sequoyah He came across a set of fossilized footprints on a boulder while on a casual hike with students
Krill was fascinated and sent a photo of the prints to his colleague, Stephen Rowland, who is a paleontologist at UNLV.
Facebook/Grand Canyon National Park In a paper published in the journal “PLOS One” in late-August, Rowland stated that the tracks are the oldest vertebrate footprints ever documented in the canyon.
The footprints are not only some of the oldest in the park, but the entire world. They provide the earliest evidence that vertebrates walked on sand dunes.
Flickr/Pedro.
Although the boulder was there all along, it took a cliff collapsing to expose it. The tracks depict two animals passing one another on the slope of a dune.
Facebook/Grand Canyon National Park
Bright Angel Trail is where the footprints were discovered. They reveal a special type of gait, known as the lateral-sequence walk, used today by animals such as dogs and cats.
Facebook/Grand Canyon National Park Scientists previously had no information about how the earliest vertebrates walked, so this is a truly revolutionary find.
Disclaimer: The photos in this article are not the 300-million-year-old fossils; they are for illustrative purposes only. Click here to read the report.
Facebook/Grand Canyon National Park
Google/Matthew Sequoyah
He came across a set of fossilized footprints on a boulder while on a casual hike with students
In a paper published in the journal “PLOS One” in late-August, Rowland stated that the tracks are the oldest vertebrate footprints ever documented in the canyon.
Flickr/Pedro.
Scientists previously had no information about how the earliest vertebrates walked, so this is a truly revolutionary find.
What are your thoughts about the discovery? Let us know, and check out our previous article to learn more about the Grand Canyon: 12 Fascinating Things You Probably Didn’t Know About The Grand Canyon In Arizona.
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Address: Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona, USA
