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Fossil found on Welsh beach ends 'confusion' over 200-million-year-old fish teeth

Photo: BBC

An amateur fossil hunter's discovery of a 200-million-year-old fish jawbone has helped solve two centuries of "confusion" over the origins of fossils across Europe, palaeontologists say.

Fossilised teeth found in rock around the Bristol Channel, along with other examples around Europe, had previously been grouped together as one type of large ancient fish called Severnichthys.

But the bone found on the Welsh side of the channel by Jonathan Bow turned out to be the first found there to belong to a different type.

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SCINASA

NASA Highlights Lessons Learned From Swift Boost Mission

A commercial mission to boost NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory concluded without raising the spacecraft’s orbit, but the agency and industry vendor Katalyst Space have gained valuable experience that will benefit future in-space servicing programs. Swift, which launched in November 2004, was designed to study gamma-ray bursts , the most powerful explosions in the cosmos. Over the last two decades, the observatory has revolutionized our understanding of how the universe works, from studying comets and asteroids in our own solar system and various types of cosmic explosions to flares from black holes in distant galaxies.