First Triassic lungfish from the Arabian Peninsula

• Triassic lungfish (Dipnoi) have been extensively documented from the Gondwanan continental and marine shelf deposits of Africa and Madagascar (Teixeira, 1949; Lehman et al., 1959; Beltan, 1968; Martin, 1979, 1981; Kemp 1996), Australia (Kemp, 1993, 1994, 1997a, 1998), India (Jainet al., 1964; Jain, 1968), and Antarctica (Dziewa, 1980). Numerous records also exist from Laurasian land masses including Europe (Agassiz, 1838; Schultze, 1981), North America (Case, 1921) and central and eastern Asia (Liu and Yeh, 1957; Vorobyeva, 1967; Martin and Ingavat, 1982). By comparison, nothing is known of contemporary lungfish fossils from the Middle East. Thus, the recent recovery of asingle tooth plate representing a new geographic occurrence of the genus Ceratodus Agassiz, 1838 from paralic marine deposits of the Jilh Formation, a latest Anisian to lower Carnian unit that crops out along the eastern margin of the Proterozoic Arabian Shield in central Saudi Arabia, is significant because it provides the stratigraphically oldest record of dipnoans from the Arabian Peninsula.

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Earth Science with specialization in Historical Geology and Palaeontology

Geovetenskap med inriktning mot historisk geologi och paleontologi

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