Ancient Amphibian Skull Discovered at Airport

[Frog News]

Livescience.com (Utah, USA) March 15th, 2010 03:04 PM: Ancient Amphibian Skull Discovered at Airport

A meat-eating amphibian that lived 300 million years ago may represent one of the earliest examples of land-based vertebrate life, scientists announced today.

Researchers discovered the fossilized head of the ancient creature in 2004, near the Pittsburgh International Airport in western Pennsylvania. The ancient amphibian has been dubbed Fedexia striegeli after FedEx, which owns the land on which the fossil was found, and for Adam Striegel, who discovered the specimen while on a field trip as an undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh.

Scientists think the species lived during an important turning point for Earth's vertebrate life (animals with backbones), which had mostly been water-based until that period. Our planet's climate was changing around that time, becoming warmer and drier as it began to come out of an ice age.

"This reduced the number of environments for highly-aquatic amphibians to live in, and forced the amphibians to become more terrestrial," said study co-author David Brezinski, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

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