Fishing By Gun In Battambang
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An international team of scientists has described a rare fossil site that is believed to be among the earliest evidence of different fish species using a common nursery — much like ones utilized by some fish today.A quarry in Strud, Belgium, that was excavated between 2004 and 2015 yielded fossils of multiple species of placoderms, which are extinct, armored fish that represent some of the earliest jawed vertebrates on Earth. Dating back to the Devonian period, an era predating the dinosaurs by hundreds of millions of years, the site yielded smaller-sized fossils that show immature placoderms occupied the area. At the same time, larger placoderm fossils, indicating mature fish, were not found.
“These sorts of juvenile-only assemblages are rare in the fossil record,” said Ted Daeschler, PhD, vice president of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, who served as a co-author on the study published in PLOS ONE. “We are quite sure that the juvenile-only placoderm assemblage is not the result of sorting of small material by water currents because there are larger skeletal elements of other kinds of fish. We believe this points to a nursery.”
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