Longest known continuous record of the Paleozoic discovered in Yukon wilderness

Discovery illuminates a 120-million-year record of ancient Earth

2021-07-09

(Press-News.org) Hundreds of millions of years ago, in the middle of what would eventually become Canada's Yukon Territory, an ocean swirled with armored trilobites, clam-like brachiopods and soft, squishy creatures akin to slugs and squid.

A trove of fossils and rock layers formed on that ancient ocean floor have now been unearthed by an international team of scientists along the banks of the Peel River a few hundred miles south of the Arctic's Beaufort Sea. The discovery reveals oxygen changes at the seafloor across nearly 120 million years of the early Paleozoic era, a time that fostered the most rapid development and diversification of complex, multi-cellular life in Earth's history.

"It's unheard of to have that much of Earth's history in one place," said Stanford University geological scientist Erik Sperling, lead author of a July 7 study detailing the team's findings in END

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Longest known continuous record of the Paleozoic discovered in Yukon wilderness

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