A FOSSIL that predates the age of the dinosaurs by 140 million years has been discovered embedded in a paving slab on a city street in Inverness.
Eagle-eyed James Ryan, who works for the National Trust for Scotland, spotted the remains of the 385 million-year-old fish right outside Inverness Town House while he was out exploring the city.
Ryan, whose job is to retell the famous fossil-related tales of Cromarty’s Victorian geologist Hugh Miller to museum visitors, believes the fossil find was not previously known in Inverness.
“These fossils in the paving slab are the remains of ancient fish dating to around 385 million years ago - around 140 million years before the first dinosaur,” he told the Inverness Courier.
Ryan added: “Caithness flagstone, of which the pavements in Inverness are made from, was laid down as sediment over a period of thousands of years at the bottom of a giant freshwater lake which stretched from the Moray coast up north to Orkney and Shetland.
“Today these rocks belong to the Old Red Sandstone formation - it is these rocks and fossils that Hugh Miller studied.”
The fossils outside the Town House are believed to date from the Devonian period and form several darker patches in the flagstone.
In some areas Ryan said were large scales belonging to some of the common bony fish of the era.
He also pointed out that there were some smaller scales from what was likely a different species from the same period.
It was reported that the flagstone contained bone fragments, and also evidence of a fin spine.
Inverness is not the only Scottish city where fossils can be spotted in paving slabs as the streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh also contain the remains of ancient animals.
The Scottish capital has so many fossils scattered around its streets that the University of Edinburgh has even published tips online about where the best places to go fossil spotting are.
Ryan said that he believes his find in the Highland city is the first time it has been documented.
He said: “Whilst fossil fish are known in pavements in cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh, to my knowledge these fossils [in Inverness] seem to have gone amiss: I brought them to the attention of a palaeontologist who studies these fossils and they were not aware of them.
“The staff at Inverness Museum likewise were not aware of these fossils either.”
