Important scientific finds don’t always come in the biggest, buzziest packages. Sometimes new discoveries come in little ugly rocks.
Important scientific finds don’t always come in the biggest, buzziest packages. Sometimes new discoveries come in little ugly rocks. Such is the case of a 6-centimeter-wide, nondescript mass of bone and teeth that helped a scientist at The University of Texas at Austin expand the geographic footprint of a large cat that roamed the Earth tens of thousands of years ago.
“You can’t even tell what it is, let alone which animal it came from,” said John Moretti, a doctoral student at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences who led research. “It’s like a geode. It’s ugly on the outside, and the treasure is all inside.”
The research was published in the May issue of The Anatomical Record.
The fossil looks like a lumpy, rounded rock with a couple of exposed teeth that are a little worse for wear, having been submerged and tumbled along the floor of the Gulf of Mexico for thousands of years before washing up on a beach. But when the fossil was X-rayed at the Jackson School’s University of Texas Computed Tomography Lab, Moretti saw there was more to the fossil that met the eye: a hidden canine tooth that had not yet erupted from the jaw bone.
Read more at University of Texas at Austin
Image: Jackson School of Geosciences doctoral student John Moretti holds a skull of the saber-toothed cat Homotherium that is part of the Jackson School’s Vertebrate Paleontology Collections. (Credit: Jackson School of Geosciences)
