From October 4 to 12, the team of the Institute of Zoology of Kazakhstan conducted a short but successful expedition to the Kurty locality in Almaty Region - one of the few continental Paleozoic sites in Kazakhstan. The exposed rocks here date back to the Permian period, about 280 million years old, meaning that the organisms found in Kurty lived long before the age of dinosaurs, zool.kz reports.
The remains of early Permian amphibians from the Kurty complex were first discovered in the 1960s during geological surveys. In the 1970s, specialists from the Paleontological Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences carried out several productive field seasons and collected more than 400 specimens. To their surprise, all the fossils belonged to a single species - Utegenia shpinari. The causes of such a low species diversity remain under discussion. More interestingly, Kurty preserves an almost complete ontogenetic series, from juveniles about 2 cm long to adults reaching 30 cm, making it an exceptional site for studying the individual development of Paleozoic amphibians.
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