22-03-2019
Portuguese paleontologists and from four more countries announce the discovery of fossils of a unique and new species of 210 million-year-old rock-lunged fish in remote areas of eastern Greenland.
Pulmonary fish, or dipnoids, are a peculiar group of fish that existed even before the dinosaurs and there are six living species today. "This group is particularly interesting because they have lungs and gills, which helps us understand our own evolution of legged animals. They belong to a broader group of fish that have evolved with limbs similar to limbs, which are ancestors of all terrestrial vertebrates, including amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds, "says Octávio Mateus, from the Faculty of Science and Technology of the New University of Lisbon and the Lourinhã Museum.
During the expeditions of 2012 and 2016 in Jameson Land, eastern Greenland, from some fossils collected from these fish, which instead of numerous teeth, had dental plaques, which is the part most easily found in the fossil record and was the element that allowed identification of the species. According to Federico Agnolin, of the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences, "this species is distinguished from the rest by robust dental plates with grooves and different forms of all other lunged fish."
