A teacher made a rare find Monday when she uncovered a mystery fossil that appears to be older than the first dinosaur to walk the planet.
Lisa Cormier, a teacher on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, was out for a walk in Cape Egmont when she saw something partially buried in the ground, according to a report.
“I saw something that I thought was a root,” Cormier said.
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“And when I looked closer at it, I realized that there were ribs. And then I saw the spine and the skull.”
A former middle school science teacher, Cormier said she knew she had stumbled upon a fossil.
Still, she had no idea how special it was.
Geologist and paleontologist John Calder believes that Cormier’s find is around 300 million years old, 100 million years before the dinosaurs ruled the world, according to the report.
“There aren’t very many specimens from this period, so it was an incredible find,” according to Calder.
“A fossil like this comes up every 50 or 100 years,” Calder said. “I mean, there’s no real frequency, but it’s rare. And this could be a one-of-a-kind fossil in the tree of life … of evolution to amphibians, to reptiles, to mammals to us.”
The fossil is likely from the Carboniferous Era, which occurred 80 million years before the first dinosaurs roamed, according to Calder.
“To think that this fossil might have been here 60 to 100 million years before the arrival of dinosaurs was so exciting that I couldn’t sleep,” Cormier said.
“I kept thinking of all the times I’d taught my science students about fossils, and now, here I’d found a significant one.”
What species the fossil belongs to is unconfirmed, according to the report.
“This is early in the evolution of reptiles from amphibians, and they’re branching out,” Calder said. “And so it’s going to be a real puzzle. It’ll probably take a good year to figure out the identity of this thing.”
Whatever it is, the fossil has been carefully removed and packaged, and the government of Prince Edward Island is set to send it to its next destination for further research.
Ottawa and Washington, D.C. are among the likely destinations, according to the report.
Cormier is stunned by her find.
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“What are the odds that I would go out for a walk and come across this fossil at the precise moment that it was exposed and nothing was covering it? I’m in awe,” Cormier said.
