00:00Roo Smith from the Yorkshire Geological Society has been reflecting on his remarkable Rounday
00:06Park find, a 320 million year old fish fossil which has now been donated to the Natural
00:12Sciences Collection at Leeds Discovery Centre.
00:15Hi, I'm Roo Smith, I'm from the Yorkshire Geological Society and I'm here in the Leeds
00:21Discovery Centre and I've come here today to donate a really exciting specimen of a
00:28coelacanth that once lived in Leeds when it was a tropical paradise about 320 million
00:35years ago.
00:36So this is a bone from its skull and I found the specimen in Rounday Park as I was doing
00:43a reconnaissance for a geological field excursion and I opened the rock looking at these freshwater
00:51mussels and there was this very dramatic and distinctive large fish skull bone.
01:00So coelacanths are pretty amazing load finned fish long thought to be extinct but then last
01:07century rediscovered.
01:10So it's absolutely cool to think that 320 million years ago you could have been standing in the
01:16position of Rounday Park in a tropical lagoon above a bed of mussels and watching coelacanths
01:23actually swimming over the top.
01:25So only a small specimen but with a fantastic story to it.
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