Planet of Life Part 2 Ancient Oceans Film

  1. Dr. Desmond Collins of the Royal Ontario Museum studies fossils from the Burgess Shale in British Columbia in Canada. The fossil beds were discovered in 1909 and have yielded over 100 fossil species to date. These date from the Cambrian Period and are 500 million years old. At
    530 million years ago no live existed on land but was abundant in the primitive seas.
  2. Dr. Harry Whitington of Cambridge University in England has studied and described many Burgess Shale species such as: Obavinia, Halucigenia, Necticaris, Dinomiscus, and Odontogryphus. A colleague Dr. Derrick Briggs of Bristol University worked for years on a fossil that looked like a shrimp tail. It is now known that over 10,000 species were present on earth during the Cambrian Period.
  3. In 1982 Dr. Harry Whitington discovered the truth about the strange shrimp tail-like fossils. There were in fact parts of a large predator that had ruled the ancient seas for more than 20 million years. It was an animal called Anomalocharis. In 1991 nearly complete fossil were found on this species. Its unusual mouth parts left “W” shaped bite marks on trilobites which were its main food source.
  4. The earliest known chordate ancestor called Picia survived this predator. Picia had a notochord which is a primitive back bone made of cartilage.
  5. Dr. David Elliot of Northern Arizona University studies a primitive fish called Pteraspis in Death Valley. 400 million years ago Death Valley was a fresh water river system. The species was @ 8 inches long. It was an armored fish and the first know fresh water fish.
  6. At Megwasha Park on the Gaspe Peninsula of northeastern Canada fossils of a species called Carolepis has been found. Carolepis is much like modern fish and has a true back bone (vertebral column). Calcium stored in this skeletal structure for muscle use in the fresh water environment.
  7. A bottom dwelling predator fish called Usthenopteron existed at the same time. It had fins that were leg-like much like the modern lung fish of the Amazon Basin and lived @ 390 million years ago.
  8. Youthful paleontologist from the British Museum of Natural History, Dr. Par Eric Alberg studies ancient amphibian salamander-like species in fossil bed in Scotland.
  9. A similar species called Ichthyostega which was a salamander @ 4 feet long was the earliest known land vertebrate animal.
  10. The sequence of evolutionary development moves in this fashion: salt water fish to fresh water fish to amphibians to reptiles. From the reptiles come the mammals and the dinosaurs, and from the dinosaurs come the birds.