“Oh, jeeze!” a renowned American paleontologist shouted out as a piece of a 375 million-year-old fossil broke off in his hand during a visit to the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.
The fossil — dated three to four times older than most dinosaurs at the museum — is a key to understanding the evolution of finned animals to limbed animals, the scientist explained.
But the ancient Tiktaalik roseae fossil will have to undergo a little surgery after U.S. researcher Neil Shubin broke a piece off while showing it off to photographers.
Rest assured, though: he and his colleague Edward Daeschler say it happens all the time.
“We’ve done this a lot,” one said before suggesting some superglue might help. “We’ve done this a million times.”
Earlier, when the fossil was still in one piece, Shubin described it as a part of Canadian and world heritage.
“It’s from a very special moment in our planet, when fish began to take their first steps on land,” he said.
He and Daeshler were in Ottawa to deliver a shipment of fossils they discovered a decade ago in the Canadian High Arctic. The fossils will make their new home at the Museum of Nature.
The researchers discovered the 375 million-year-old Tiktaalik roseae in 2004; the resulting research has since made international headlines, they said.
“Some of the greatest value for future work is how well preserved these are,” Daeshler said of the fossils. “We’ve had some real skilled people working on the preparation, which is removing the sedimentary rock from around the fossils, and now the next step is to make sure they’re here for the future, for researchers to use them again and again and again.”
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