The Royal Tyrrell Museum is pleased to welcome Jason Anderson from the University of Calgary on February 19 as the next presenter for the 2015 Speaker Series with his talk on “Gaps in the Fossil Record of Vertebrates.”
Our understanding of the history of life on Earth is derived directly and indirectly from fossils. When the fossil record is less than perfect, which is usually the case, we can be misled.
One of the biggest gaps in the fossil record of four-legged animals (called tetrapods, tetra = four, poda = feet) occurs after the mass extinction at the end of the Devonian Period (~375 million years ago) and into the Carboniferous Period. This time interval, called “Romer’s Gap,” is of great importance because it is during this time that four-legged animals left the water to colonize land.
Romer’s Gap has been interpreted as an absence of fossils, but new discoveries in Scotland and Nova Scotia suggest that it is due to a reduction in the preservation potential of fossils, not their absence, which has caused so few to be found.
These new fossils shed light on the first steps of four-legged animals out of water and reveal that tetrapods may have been less affected by the end-Devonian extinction event than previously thought.
The Royal Tyrrell Museum’s Speaker Series talks are free and open to the public. The first part of the series will be held every Thursday until February 26, 2015 at 11:00 a.m. in the Museum auditorium. Speaker Series talks are also available on the Museum’s YouTube channel: youtube.com/user/RoyalTyrrellMuseum.
