A team of scientists has discovered in Penha Garcia, in the municipality of Idanha-a-Nova, the oldest animal fossils found in Portugal, with an age of over 560 million years.
In a statement sent to the Lusa news agency, the municipality of Idanha-a-Nova, in the Castelo Branco district, revealed that the discovery was made by a team of scientists working with the support of the municipality and coordinated by Carlos Neto de Carvalho, a paleontologist from the Naturtejo Geopark.
“The oldest animal fossils found in Portugal have now been discovered near Penha Garcia. Ages obtained in the vicinity of where the fossils were found point to values in excess of 560 million years.”
Penha Garcia was already recognized by the international scientific community for the existence of fossils of marine organisms that lived there almost 480 million years ago.
The new paleontological site was discovered near the Chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The fossils were found by Italian paleontologist Andrea Baucon as part of an ongoing investigation.
“The discovery was an incredible thrill. We’ve been looking for these fossils for over 15 years, but only now have we found them,” said Andrea Baucon.
Until now, fossilized animal remains had never been found in such ancient rocks.
Not far from Penha Garcia, the oldest fossils in Portugal, bacteria measuring a thousandth of a millimeter, had already been described by geologist António Sequeira.
The fossils now found occur in rocks even older than those and will therefore be even older.
“This implies that the newly discovered fossils faced a dizzying time gap,” said the Italian paleontologist.
The animal would have been just under 10 millimeters wide and left its somewhat sinuous path preserved in the rocks as it fed on organic remains contained in the sediments.
This mark of biological activity, known as an ichnofossil, allows us to understand how this animal fed.
“We know that the organism responsible for the ichnofossil had a rigid skeleton, something that is indicated to us by the way it penetrated and churned the sediments as it moved around with the intention of looking for food, moving up and down, to one side and the other – mobility, evidence of reaction to nervous stimuli and the presence of a skeleton are criteria that best define animal activity,” said Carlos Neto de Carvalho.
The UNESCO World Geopark Naturtejo is organizing a new research campaign in Penha Garcia, while scientists from the Natural History Museum of Piacenza and the University of Genoa are analyzing the curious shape of the structures already found.
