A ten-year old British student has taken the world of Paleontology by storm with his discovery of a fossilized imprint that experts believe is more than 300 million-years old, from the Carboniferous period around the time when Pangaea was being formed.
Bruno Debattista, a member of the after school club at Oxford University's Museum of Natural History was on a vacation in Cornwall last summer, when he came across a shale that appeared to have a fossilized print on it. Encouraged by the history club instructors to seek out and pick up anything that looked interesting, he decided to take it in for the club's weekly show and tell session. Suspecting that the shale might be an important discovery, the museum officials decided to send it to the experts for assessment.
Earlier this week, after a thorough analysis and much argument, they came back with their verdict - Young Bruno had indeed been right. The shale had captured and preserved the footprints of a couple of horseshoe crabs for over 300 million years.
Needless to say, Bruno who was selected by his teachers to attend this club because of his strong love of natural history is thrilled and has decided to donate his first important archeological find to the museum.
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