| Title | Ancient 'Texas Serengeti' Had Elephant-like Animals, Rhinos, Alligators and More | |
| Date | Saturday April 13 2019, @05:58AM | |
| Author | Fnord666 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the bone-to-pick-with-history dept. | ||
During the Great Depression, some unemployed Texans were put to work as fossil hunters. The workers retrieved tens of thousands of specimens that have been studied in small bits and pieces while stored in the state collections of The University of Texas [(UT)] at Austin for the past 80 years.
Now, decades after they were first collected,a UT researcher has studied and identified an extensive collection of fossils from dig sites near Beeville, Texas, and found that the fauna make up a veritable "Texas Serengeti—with specimens including elephant-like animals, rhinos, alligators, antelopes, camels, 12 types of horses and several species of carnivores. In total, the fossil trove contains nearly 4,000 specimens representing 50 animal species, all of which roamed the Texas Gulf Coast 11 million to 12 million years ago.
[...]In addition to shedding light on the inhabitants of an ancient Texas ecosystem, the collection is also valuable because of its fossil firsts. They include a new genus of gomphothere, an extinct relative of elephants with a shovel-like lower jaw, and the oldest fossils of the American alligator and an extinct relative of modern dogs.
Texas's abundant land and similar ecosystems have also made it a refuge for extremely endangered animals like the Oryx in modern times.
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printed from SoylentNews, Ancient 'Texas Serengeti' Had Elephant-like Animals, Rhinos, Alligators and More on 2024-04-24 16:58:54