After 25 years of collecting fossils at a
Pennsylvania site, scientists at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel
University now have a much better picture of an ancient, extinct 12-foot fish
and the world in which it lived.
Although Hyneria lindae was
initially described in 1968, it was done without a lot of fossil material to go on. But since the mid-1990s, dedicated
volunteers, students, and paleontologists digging at the Red Hill site in
northern Pennsylvania's Clinton County have turned up more - and better quality
- fossils of the fish's skeleton that have led to new insights.
Academy researchers Ted Daeschler, PhD, and
Jason Downs, PhD, who specialize in the Devonian time period (a time before
dinosaurs and even land animals) when Hyneria lived, have been able
to reconstruct that the predator had a blunt, wide snout, reached 10-12 feet in
length, had small eyes and featured a sensory system that allowed it to hunt
prey by feeling pressure waves around it.
"Dr. Keith Thomson, the man who first
described Hyneria in 1968, did not have enough fossil material to
reconstruct the anatomy that we have now been able to document with more
extensive collections," explained Daeschler, curator of Vertebrate Zoology
at the Academy, as well as a professor in Drexel's College of Arts and
Sciences.
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