A rare 280 million-year-old fossil resembling a lizard-like creature is mostly just a carved rock painted black, a new analysis reveals.
The study's lead author, Valentina Rossi, a paleobiologist at University College Cork in Ireland, told Live Science she was hoping to learn more about how the creature was fossilized and discovering the skin was fake was"totally unexpected." "He couldn't analyze this fossil with the techniques that we have today, so his description was the best we could make at the time," Rossi said.
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