A groundbreaking discovery in Texas is rewriting the state’s geological record.
Scientists from The University of Texas at Austin recently discovered Jurassic vertebrate fossils in the Malone Mountains of West Texas.
The remnants date to around 150 million years ago — a time when a shallow sea covered the present-day deserts of northeastern Mexico and West Texas.
Steve May, a research associate at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences Museum of Earth History, discovered the gap in Texas’ fossil record in 2015.
Marine invertebrates — snails, gastropods, and ammonites — were the only Jurassic-era organisms whose fossils had been found in Texas, something that didn’t sit well with May.
“You just don’t want to believe that there are no Jurassic bones in Texas,” May said in a UT Austin news release. “Plus, there was a tantalizing clue.”
A paper written in 1938 by Claude Albritton, a scientist eventually employed as a geology professor at Southern Methodist University, spoke of significant bone fragment findings in the Malone Mountains.
This placed the range — or more specifically, the 13-square-mile Jurassic-aged Malone formation — in May’s crosshairs.
“It’s frequently part of the scientific process,” explained Lisa Boucher, director of the Jackson School’s Non-Vertebrate Paleontology Lab, according to SciTechDaily. “There’re a few lines buried in an old publication, and you think ‘surely somebody has already looked at that,’ but often they haven’t. You need to delve into it.”
After two expeditions, May’s team found large but mostly eroded fragments of a plesiosaur — a long-necked prehistoric marine predator that could grow up to 43 feet long.
The creature’s extremities and spine can be made out in the fossilized finds.
May and Boucher were among the authors of a paper on the groundbreaking discovery, which appeared in Rocky Mountain Geology.
And May believes that this is only the beginning of vertebrate fossils being found in Texas.
“Folks, there are Jurassic vertebrates out there,” May said. “We found some of them, but there’s more to be discovered that can tell us the story of what this part of Texas was like during the Jurassic.”
Anyone looking to check out animatronic dinosaurs can visit the seasonal display, Dinosaurs Live!
As reported in The Dallas Express, the Heard Museum in McKinney will host the popular exhibit for the 16th time from September 2 until February 19.
