The Nation - News from June 23, 1988

The oldest cache of fossil land animals ever found in North America, including amphibians never seen before, has been discovered in an Iowa quarry, researchers reported in the British journal Nature. Among the creatures discovered in the quarry was a still-unnamed amphibian 335 million years old that probably looked like a giant, 6-foot salamander. The creature was among the first to walk the North American continent, at a time when it was mostly under water and the land on which the animal roamed would have been more like a tropical island than present-day Iowa. More than 500 fossils of fish and amphibians have been dug out of the unused limestone quarry in southeastern Iowa near the farming town of Delta.