Wednesday December 31, 2025
ScienceDaily —
Scientists have uncovered more than 30,000 fossilized teeth, bones, and other remains on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen. The fossils come from a 249 million year old marine community that included extinct reptiles, amphibians, bony fish, and sharks. Together, they document one of the earliest known expansions of land-dwelling animals into ocean ecosystems after a period of extreme global warming and mass extinction at the very beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs.
The fossils were first discovered in 2015, but transforming them into scientific evidence required nearly ten years of careful excavation, preparation, sorting, identification, and analysis. The results of this long effort have now been published by researchers from the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo and the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm.