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Whitby Lighthouses / PublicDomainPictures / Pixabay |
Crumbling seaside cliffs at Whitby in northern England continuously reveal new fossils. Most of them are remains of small plants and animals, but researchers from the University of Manchester described a much larger fossil: a giant vertebra from a sauropod's tail. How long ago was the rare bone buried?You can dig up the rest of the article by clicking on "Britain's 'Oldest' Sauropod and a Jurassic World".
Researchers described the rock formation containing this rare fossil in the online journal PLoS ONE. Sedimentary rocks containing sea creature fossils sandwich the Saltwick Formation, a roughly 80-foot-thick sandstone layer. Enlightenment Era naturalists assigned these rocks to the Jurassic System based on their evolutionary age expectations for certain fossils. The PLoS ONE authors repeated this assignment, writing, "Palynomorph [plant pollen fossil] evidence indicates that the latter formation is Aalenian in age." "Aalenian" refers to an "age" within a middle Jurassic time "Period," but these ages and periods only occur in man-made diagrams. The real rocks show no time stamps.
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