Researchers at UT Austin have discovered fossilized remains of an extinct marine reptile in the Malone Mountains of West Texas. The discovery of the fossils is solid evidence of Jurassic life in the state.
The Jurassic period spans from 145 to 205 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Steve May, a research associate at UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences, began searching for Jurassic bones in 2015 while reading about the geology of the Malone Mountains. Before this discovery, he said the only record of Jurassic life in Texas were ammonites and snails. Vertebrates, animals with backbones, had not yet been found.
May studies vertebrate paleontology at UT and says finding Jurassic fossils requires having Jurassic-aged rocks. Due to Texas’ geological surface, finding visible rocks, or outcrops, from this period is difficult. In a literature review, he learned that previous geologists and paleontologists had found large bone fragments in Jurassic-aged rocks in the Malone Mountains, but no one ever collected or described these remains.
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