Waiting inside its burrow forever

About 230 million years ago, in what is now Wyoming, United States, some amphibians took refuge in their burrows to wait for the arrival of rainy days, characteristic of one of the seasons of the year at that time and place.

Their wait lasted longer than expected. Much more.

It lasted so long that they ended up petrified, in the figurative sense of the expression, due to the unbearable tedium they had to suffer along with much worse restrictions, but also in a quite literal sense, since the corpses became fossilized.

The discovery of fossil remains of some of these specimens and their subsequent analysis by a team led by Calvin So, from George Washington University in Washington, DC, United States, has made it possible to bring to light this episode of the natural world and identify a species hitherto unknown, which has been given the name Ninumbeehan dookoodukah.

The photograph shows the fossilized skull of one of these individuals.

(Photo: David Lovelace)

The study is titled “Fossil amphibian offers insights into the interplay between monsoons and amphibian evolution in palaeoequatorial Late Triassic systems.” And it has been published in the academic journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)