Out of the Swamps

摘要

Roughly 340 million years ago, a small beast built somewhat like a lizard was scampering along the edge of a tropical lagoon when it met its fate. No one knows what killed the wiener-size creature. A tropical storm might have drowned it, or perhaps a sudden wave washed it from shore. In any event, the animal fell into the lagoon and sank into the annals of paleontology. In 1992, an amateur fossil collector spotted the remnants of this four-legged creature on the shore of Cheese Bay, Scotland. For the next 5 years, the fossil sat in a drawer at the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh, where researchers were engrossed in ongoing projects. Finally, paleontologists retrieved the headless specimen and started the painstaking process of chipping away the rock.