An international team of scientists from Scotland, South Africa, Switzerland and Zimbabwe has identified a fossil lungfish species that lived at the dawn of the dinosaur era, about 210 million years ago. The discovery is reported by researchers in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The find came during fieldwork in the Middle Zambezi basin in northern Zimbabwe, where paleontologists uncovered remains that belong to a new species named Ferganoceratodus edwardsi. These ancient lungfish inhabited the Early Triassic, a period marking recovery after a mass extinction and setting the stage for ecosystems that followed.
Lungfish, a distinctive lineage of freshwater fish, have long captured scientific curiosity for their unusual biology and slow rates of change over time.
Today’s lungfish are considered among the closest living relatives to creatures that first ventured onto land, including ancestors of amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. This connection makes lungfish a valuable reference point for understanding vertebrate evolution and the early history of terrestrial life.
Because several features of early lungfish are still preserved in fossils, researchers often describe living lungfish as a modern window into deep time. The new fossil suggests that key lungfish traits were already established by the Early Triassic and that these animals diversified as their supercontinent Gondwana began to fragment into the landmasses we recognize today in Africa and South America.
In the broader scope of prehistoric research, the discovery adds a meaningful piece to the puzzle of how vertebrates migrated, adapted and survived dramatic climate shifts that defined the Triassic world. The team notes that the record emphasizes a stepwise appearance of lineage features that would later characterize both aquatic and semi-aquatic vertebrates across multiple Gondwanan continents. Attributions: researchers and journals in the field of vertebrate paleontology.