Broken leg bone reveals switch to life on land

• Autores: Colin Barras
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3022, 2015, pág. 14
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Peter Bishop at the Queensland Museum in Hendra, Australia, and his colleagues analyzed a rare tetrapod fossil from that gap in the tetrapod fossil, a 1.5-meter-long Ossinodus which lived some 333 million years ago in what is now Australia. They found that Qssinodus' forearm bones were strong enough to support the animal's body on land. It also has what Bishop believes is the world's oldest known broken tetrapod bone. When the team used computer software to reconstruct the forces required to cause the break, they found the magnitude of the force was so large relative to the size of the animal that the accident must have occurred on land. The team concludes that the break happened when the animal dropped 85 centimeters, perhaps by falling off a rock or a log in the temperate forests that covered parts of Australia at the time