(DailyEmailNews.com) – Highlighting how little we know of the world, people in Inverness, Scotland, have been recently walking over a piece of history older than dinosaurs without even realizing it.
The BBC reported that a pavement slab outside the Inverness Town House contains fish fossils dating back to 385 million years ago.
James Ryan, who works at a National Trust for Scotland museum, discovered these ancient remains while walking.
He noted that while fossil fish embedded in pavements are not uncommon in cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh, these particular fossils had been overlooked.
“Whilst fossil fish are known in pavements in cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh, to my knowledge these fossils seem to have gone amiss,” Ryan told the BBC.
He explained that the fossils in the paving slab are “the remains of ancient fish dating to around 385 million years ago – around 140 million years before the first dinosaur.”
The flagstone containing these fossils was quarried from the Scottish Highlands.
Ryan elaborated on its origins, saying, “Caithness flagstone [where the fossils were found] was laid down as sediment over a period of thousands of years at the bottom of a giant freshwater lake which stretched from the Moray coast up north to Orkney and Shetland.”
According to BBS Natural Stone Specialists, this type of flagstone is among the rarest in the world.
Interestingly, both the paleontologist Ryan consulted and the staff at an Inverness museum were previously unaware of these fossils.
This development highlights how significant and unexpected this discovery was.
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