Remains of the day: Texas researchers unearth prehistoric skeleton
Just outside this small Baylor County, Texas, town, researchers at a new museum are carefully digging away, hoping to unearth a significant discovery.
In a place where scientists have been poking around in the red dirt since the 1880s, researchers at Seymour’s Whiteside Museum of Natural History believe they have found a Dimetrodon skeleton.
Working on the side of the hill since the first of the year, Chris Flis, the museum’s director, and a small team of volunteers have slowly scraped and brushed away the gray clay encasing the remains.
“Right now, we don’t know what species it is, and it’s very exciting,” Flis said. “ This skeleton is going to tell us a lot about what was going on with Dimetrodon families — why they went extinct in certain areas and why some of them survived and turned into some of the species that we’re familiar with.”
The four-legged Dimetrodons may not be as exciting as a Tyrannosaurus Rex or some other beasts popularized in Jurassic Park and scores of other dinosaur flicks.
And actually, they weren’t even dinosaurs; they were pelycosaurs — more closely related to mammals than reptiles — and roamed the Earth 60 million years before the first dinosaurs.
The best guess on this latest Dimetrodon — dubbed Mary — is that it lived about 290 million years ago, far enough back to have roamed this part of North Texas before the region disappeared under the ocean in the early Permian Period, forcing the Dimetrodons to adapt or die.
This story was originally published February 10, 2015 at 11:27 AM.