A painting depicting an Early Jurassic scene from the Navajo Sandstone desert preserved at Glen Canyon NRA. A small team of paleontologists worked with artist Brian Engh to provide a technically accurate depiction of the rare and enigmatic tritylodonts (close mammal relatives) discovered in March during low water levels of Lake Powell. Credit: NPS / Brian Engh
Phys.org has a story about the discovery of some rare fossils new Lake Powell in Utah. Tritylodontid mammaliaforms are rare animals that lived during the Jurassic Period about 180 million years ago. The fossils were discovered in an area that would ordinarily be covered in water... you might say that the paleontologists were in the right place at the right time, just before the snow melt in the spring of 2023. The fossils will reside in the Glen Canyon NRA museum collection. A paper describing this rare find was published in the journal Geology of the Intermountain West.
While documenting fossil tracksites along a stretch of Lake Powell, a Glen Canyon National Recreation Area (Glen Canyon NRA) field crew discovered the first tritylodontid bonebed found in the Navajo Sandstone in Utah. These extremely rare fossils are one of the more important fossil vertebrate discoveries in the United States this year.
The discovery included body fossils like bones and teeth, which are rare in the geologic formation known as the Navajo Sandstone within the Glen Canyon Group. This new discovery will shed light on the fossil history exposed on the changing shorelines of Lake Powell.