Teacher on walk finds fossil older than first dinosaur on Earth

CAPE EGMONT, Prince Edward Island — A Canadian teacher out for a walk stumbled upon a rare fossil that appears to date back to before dinosaurs walked the Earth.

>> Read more trending news

Lisa Cormier, a teacher on Prince Edward Island, was walking in Cape Egmont on Monday afternoon when she saw something partially buried, she told CBC.

“I saw something that I thought was a root,” Cormier told CBC. “And when I looked closer at it, I realized that there were ribs. And then I saw the spine, and the skull.”

Cormier, who currently teaches French and history to high schoolers, used to teach middle school science, and told The Washington Post that she immediately knew what she found was a fossil. But at the time, she had no idea how special her find was.

John Calder, a geologist and paleontologist, told The Washington Post that the fossil is likely 300 million years old. That’s 100 million years before the dinosaurs walked the earth in the Jurassic period.

“There aren’t very many specimens from this period, so it was an incredible find,” Calder told The Washington Post.

Calder was a specialist asked to examine the fossil, and has written a book on the geological heritage of Prince Edward Island.

“A fossil like this comes up every 50 or 100 years,” Calder told CBC. “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.”

“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 told The Washington Post. “I kept thinking of all the times I’d taught my science students about fossils, and now, here’d I’d found a significant one.”

Calder said that he believes the fossil is from the Carboniferous Era, which ended 80 million years before the first dinosaurs, according to the Canadian Press.

The fossil was carefully removed, wrapped in newspaper, burlap and plastic, and then taken to a paleontological repository for safekeeping, the Canadian Press reported. The government of Prince Edward Island will determine where it goes, and told the Canadian Press that it would likely be sent to either Ottawa or Washington, D.C. to be studied further.

As far as what the animal is, it’s too early to say.

“This is early in the evolution of reptiles from amphibians, and they’re branching out,” Calder told CBC. “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.”

“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 told The Washington Post.

©2022 Cox Media Group