Rise of the land mammals
An ancient amphibian fossil suggests that climate change helped animals colonise the land more than 300 million years ago.
The well-preserved five-inch long skull belonged to a creature which chiefly lived on land at a time when most life was thought to be water-based.
Fedexia striegeli - named after the FedEx courier company that owned the land where the fossil was found - belongs to an extinct group of amphibians living 70 million years before the first dinosaurs appeared.
Other known members of the Trematopid family appeared 20 million years later during a major expansion of terrestrial vertebrates. Fedexia provides scientists with early evidence of how the change from a wet to a dry climate led to the rise of land-dwelling animals.
The fossil was found in 2004 near Pittsburgh International Airport in Pennsylvania, US.
At the time of its preservation the global climate was in a period of transition. As increasing amounts of the planet's water became locked up in polar ice, sea level dropped and more land was exposed. Vast regions of the Earth became drier and warmer, including the area of western Pennsylvania, which at the time was near the equator.
As life adapted to the changing conditions more and more animals left their watery environment and made new homes on dry land.
Dr David Brezinski, from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, one of the scientists who studied the fossils, said: "The one-to-one correspondence between this early appearance of trematopids in the fossil record and the preservation of dry climate indicators in the surrounding rock units suggests that this is a climatically driven immigration and/or origination event."
The climatic change to warmer conditions led to a dispersal of land animals to coastal regions and lowlands, where their dead bodies had a better chance of being preserved in solidified mud.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
