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Aquatic and Land Animal Diversity

Amphibians

What fossil amphibian was once mistaken for a human skeleton?

In 1731, Swiss geologist Johann Scheuchzer (1672–1733) found a fossil of what he thought was a human skeleton—what he called Homon diluvii testis, or “man, a witness of the flood,” in reference to the Bible. What he had actually discovered was the fossil of a twenty million-year-old extinct giant salamander.



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