Word: triassic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...scientists to identify the 2½-in.-long fossil, Paleontologist Edwin Colbert, of the American Museum of Natural History, last week announced that it was a bit of jaw bone from a 3 to 4 ft. salamander-like creature that lived about 200 million years ago in the early Triassic period. It was the first evidence that land vertebrates had roamed Antarctica when its climate was warm...
What's more, the Antarctic animal belonged to a group of long-extinct freshwater amphibians called Labyrinthodonts, which are known to have lived in both Australia and South Africa in the early Triassic period. The discovery thus lent support to those who believe that Antarctica, Australia, South America and India were once a single supercontinent, called "Gondwanaland,"* that broke up and drifted apart. Creatures like the labyrinthodonts, the continental drifters argue, would not have evolved separately on such isolated continents as Antarctica and Australia...