A dark sliver of rock pulled from an Oklahoma limestone quarry is the world’s oldest fossil cast of skin ever found.
The fossil is nearly 290 million years old, and once dressed an early member of the amniotes, a clade of four-legged vertebrates that evolved from amphibians and includes all reptiles, birds and mammals, researchers report January 11 in Current Biology. It’s 21 million years older than the only other reported fossilized skin from the Paleozoic Era, spanning 541 million to 252 million years ago, during which animals moved onshore and diversified.
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