Morocco is home to major discoveries recently, including the world’s oldest starfish fossil.

Scientists have discovered a crushed ossified lung of a 66- million years old coelacanth in Oued Zem, in Morocco’s Beni Mellal-Khenifra region.

SCI News reported the discovery on Monday, announcing that a team of paleontologists unearthed  a crushed ossified lung of the marine coelacanth.

The species lived during the Late Cretaceous epoch, which dates back to 66 million years ago.

Other reports suggested that experts discovered the remains of the Coelacanths species by accident.

“A collector had bought the specimen thinking the bone might have been part of a pterodactyl’s skill,” said one news report. 

Paleontologist David Martil said “only one animal has such a structure and that is the Coelacanth.”

Martil, a professor at the School of the Environment, Geograppy, and Geosciences at the University of Portsmouth, explained that the collector of the specimen was “disappointed he did not have a pterosaur skull.”

He added, “But my colleagues and I were thrilled as no Coelacanth has even been found in the phosphate deposits of Morocco, and this example was absolutely massive.”

The species emerged 200 million years before the first dinosaur.

Scientists believed it to be extinct, until researchers discovered a living Coelacanth off South Africa in 1938.

Morocco is home to major discoveries that recently made international headlines. One of the latest discoveries was just a few days ago, when a team of scientists from Moroccan and Spanish universities discovered a 2.5 million year old macaque fossil in Guefait, Morocco.

On January 20, researchers from Cambridge University and the University of Western Australia discovered a precious 480 million years-old fossil of a Starfish in the Fezouata shale of the Anti-Atlas Mountain range.

Source: Morocco World News