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Finding a single fossil from an animal that died about 50 million years ago, it's cool. To find two? It's just great. But what about finding 259 of them at once? Well, there is not a word in English to describe this level of grandeur.
That's exactly what researchers at Arizona State University and the Mizuta Memorial Museum in Japan found by hiding in a large piece of limestone in the fossil hotspot known as Green River Formation. The hundreds of tiny fossils are what are left of a group of tiny fish that were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this discovery helps scientists better understand the behavior of ancient fish.
The discovery, which was written in a new research paper published in Acts of the Royal Society B, is like a window in time. Tiny fish, some of which measure up to 20 millimeters in depth, seem to have traveled in a bench like fish today, which is very important for researchers trying to paint a picture of the behavior of ancient species.
Bones can only teach us a lot about long gone species, and trying to find clues about how they acted is often almost impossible. These fish of the size of a pint, which would have been caught in a mass of free-falling sand in shallow waters, clearly clustered in a formation similar to the one we see today in the small fish, which means that fish have been doing it for at least 50 million years.
"Group movements by groups of animals can emerge from simple rules that govern the interactions of each individual with his neighbors. Studies of existing species have shown how such rules lead to coordinated group behavior, but little is known about their evolutionary origins or about whether living organisms living in extinct groups used similar rules, "write Researchers. "Our study highlights the possibility of exploring the social communication of extinct animals, which was thought to leave no trace of fossil."
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