A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B profiles a recently discovered species of amphibian that survived harsh Wyoming weather conditions by burrowing into the ground.
Dave Lovelace, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Wisconsin, came across the fossils in their burrows on U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land near Dubois.
He returned there over the years, eventually partnering with the Eastern Shoshone Tribal Historic Preservation Office in 2021 to bring elders and 7th grade students from Fort Washakie School to the site.
The idea was to have researchers talk about the fossils and for elders of the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes to discuss their knowledge of the creatures.
“[We were] looking at weaving those two narratives together,” said Lovelace. “We don’t have that built-in knowledge and history.”
Reba Teran is a member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and a co-author of the paper. She named the species Ninumbeehan dookoodukah, two Shoshone words that mean “The Little People” and “Flesh Eater,” which refers to the fossil’s sharp teeth.
For generations, names given to new species were made using two Latin or Greek words to describe them for the scientific community. They generally aren't given names from those in local Indigenous communities where the species lived.
“I like that [name] because, in this modern age, we need to honor our past,” said Teran in an audio recording that’s part of the paper. “The Ninumbee are still here with us. They were very powerful beings. They were only three feet tall, and they live up in our mountains even today. They’re kind of almost magical, too. Our ancestors honored them with, for instance, they call Wind River Canyon … ‘Little People’s River.’”
Lovelace said Ninumbeehan dookoodukah are significant, in part, because present-day Wyoming is notorious among paleontologists for not having much in the way of fossils from the late Triassic period.
“The joke was, in the department, if you piss off your advisor, they're going to send you off into Chugwater to look for fossils, because it was a fool's errand,” he said. “So finding a site where we found hundreds of a single taxon, regardless of where you are in the world and what time period you're working in – that is an exceptional find.”
Around 230 million years ago, when the species was alive, Wyoming was subject to monsoon seasons followed by prolonged periods of drought.
During dryer times, Lovelace said these amphibians would burrow into the ground, likely emitting a mucus membrane to protect themselves and the water around them and enabling a state of hibernation called estivation.
They would emerge again when the underground water table rose high enough to rouse them.
“The fact that we're finding so many of these burrows filled with skeletons was probably indicative of a longer or an extended period of drought,” said Lovelace.
According to him, the early amphibians’ burrowing habits give researchers hope about a way for modern amphibians to survive the effects of present-day climate change.
“This is something that was deep seated in this lineage of amphibians, that ability to do this, and that's pretty significant because we're seeing a lot of aridification and shifting of climate regimes,” Lovelace said. “[I’m] not saying that [their burrowing is] a panacea for amphibians, because they are absolutely one of the most sensitive groups of organisms that are affected by climate.”
The decision to reach out to the Eastern Shoshone Tribe about visiting the fossils together came after the social justice movements following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, he added.
“It kind of evolved into this idea of, ‘Why don't we take the students out to the field, do a field trip and talk about the Western perspective, how we're interpreting the rocks, why we see what we see?’” Lovelace said. “And then have elders talking about the history of their people and their interpretations.”
That exchange altered the way he and his students conduct field research.
“[Paleontology] is inherently an extractive science,” he said. “These were once-living animals, and we're extracting them out of the place where they were interred. [That place] has some cultural significance, and learning how to appropriately work with that – I think it's an important thing because it's respectful of that culture and community.”
A documentary film about the relationship between the researchers and the tribal community called “What’s in a Name? Decolonizing Paleontology” is set to premiere this spring in Fort Washakie.
This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.
