Ancient armoured fish that narrowly avoided meteorite strike reveals life before history’s largest ever extinction
Rare well-preserved fish fossil from Brazil is named as Leolepismatogrossensis by new study.
Leolepis is 15 centimetres long and has armoured scales covered in enamel and dentine – the same materials as our teeth.
Living 254 million years ago, Leolepis offers an insight into a world just before as many as 95% of all species went extinct in a mass extinction event at the end of the Permian.
A rare fossil discovered near South America’s largest known meteorite crater has been named as a new species.
Initially mistaken for a frog by locals, Leolepismatogrossensis is actually a species of ancient ray-finned fish – the group that includes 96% of all bony fishes alive today including tuna, salmon and cod. It’s a fairly primitive member of the group and lived around 254 million years ago.
Unlike most modern ray-finned fishes, which have thin and flexible scales, Leolepis was armoured. Its tough scales were made of dentine and enamel – the same substances that form human teeth.
Leolepis lived in a ‘megalake’ that formed out of an inland sea that once existed when modern South America and Africa were joined in the supercontinent Gondwana. Based on its small teeth, the 15-centimetre-long fish is thought to have fed on small invertebrates and plants.
The fossil provides a glimpse of this ancient ecosystem before the megalake was hit by the three-kilometre-wide Araguainha asteroid around 252 million years ago. This dates it to the beginning of the biggest ever mass extinction, when around 78% of life on land and as many as 95% of all marine species perished.
This mass extinction is mainly thought to have been caused by massive volcanic eruptions in what are now Siberia and China that transformed the climate, but the Araguainha impact may have had an additional impact on habitats in the southern hemisphere.
Dr Martha Richter, the study's corresponding author and a Scientific Associate at the Natural History Museum, London, says: “Most fishes of this age in Brazil are generally known from scattered teeth, scales and isolated bone fragments. Leolepis, on the other hand, is remarkably complete, especially considering a major meteorite strike warped the nearby rocks!”
“Its completeness and characteristics offer a window into the evolution of ray-finned fish. The discovery of Leolepis also shows that there could be many incredible new fossils still to come not just from Brazil, but South America as a whole.”
Dr Martha Richter is available for interview through the Natural History Museum’s Press Office.
Leolepis is named after geologist Léo Adriano de Oliveira, who found and collected its fossil originally, and the Ancient Greek for scale ‘lepis’. Its specific name, matogrossensis, is named after the Brazillian state of Mato Grosso in midwestern Brazil where the species was discovered.
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