A Devonian bony fish mortality plate showing the lower shield of Geneaspis podolica (Lankester, 1869) from the Lower Devonian deposits of Podolia, Ukraine.
As the war continues in Ukraine, our hearts go out to those who live and work here who contribute greatly to our understanding of Podolia, a historic region in Eastern Europe, located in the west-central and southwestern parts of Ukraine, in the northeast. Moldova.
Looking at a map of Ukraine, I imagine a torch touching the edges of the mental map setting it on fire — the edges slowly burning and curling as the world watches and good people on both sides feel the burn.
Ukraine emerged as the concept of a nation and Ukrainians as a nationality with the Ukrainian National Revival in the mid-18th century, after the peasant uprising of 1768-1769 and the eventual Polish-Lithuanian split. Commonwealth. They have long known a tense love/hate relationship with their neighboring countries, which share culture and language but long for freedom and independence.
It became an independent state in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This fertile part of the world has an archeological record of human habitation going back to the first millennium BC — the oldest known major inhabitants of Ukraine were the Cimmerians. They were replaced in the Fifth Century BC by the Scythians who ruled until the 2nd Century BC. They were replaced by the Sarmatian tribes. Wars, battles and skirmishes ensued until the tribesmen of the dominant horde, the Alanis, could be said to rule in the First Century AD. During our recorded history, our ancestors probably hunted and passed through it much earlier.
Beneath our human habitation and current military action are rocks that tell the story of Earth’s violent past. The fauna here is from the Silurian and records a time in our Earth’s history where the planet suffered a major mass extinction event that wiped out 23 percent of all marine life. This is the only region in Ukraine where 420 million-year-old remains of ichthyofauna are found close to the surface, making them accessible for collection and study.
Zenaspis is an extinct genus of jawless fish that flourished in the early Devonian. Being jawless, Zenaspis is likely a bottom feeder, feeding on debris from the seafloor similar to how flounder, grouper, bass and other bottom-feeding fish thrive.
Over the past 150 years, vertebrate fossils have been found in more than 90 localities located in outcrops along the banks of the Dniester River and its northern tributaries, and in sandstone quarries.
Currently, the faunal list of Early Devonian agnathans and fishes from Podolia has seventy-two species, including 8 Thelodonti, 39 Heterostraci, 19 Osteostraci, 4 Placodermi, 1 Acanthodii, and 1 Holocephali (Voichyshyn 2001a) .
In Podolia, the Lower Devonian Redbeds strata (the Old Red Formation or Dniester Series) are 1800 meters thick and range from Lochkovian to Eifelian in age (Narbutas 1984; Drygant 2000, 2003).
In their lower part, the Ustechko and Khmeleva members of the Dniester Series are developed from beautiful multicolored, mainly red, fine-grained cross-bedded massive quartz sandstones and siltstones with seams of argillites (Drygant 2000).
We see fossils of Zenaspis in the early Devonian of Western Europe. both Zenaspis pagei and Zenaspis powers are found up to 25 centimeters long in the Devonian outcrops of Scotland.
Reference: Voichyshyn, V. 2006. New osteostracans from the Lower Devonian terrigenous deposits of Podolia, Ukraine. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 51 (1): 131–142. Image courtesy of the remarkable Fossilero Fisherman, a fossil hunter dedicated to collecting exposures in Ukraine’s Lower Devonian Creek
