Fish scale from Oman

This tiny fragment of fossil fish was discovered by chance in 2006 by Museum scientist Dr Giles Miller.

Miller spotted the fossil when he was studying a rock sample from Oman as part of a consultancy contract. He identified it as part of the body armour of one of the earliest armoured jawless fishes - a group known as the pteraspidomorphs. These fish evolved over 450 million years ago during the Ordovician period, making them some of the first to colonise the ocean.

This fragment has been attributed to the genus Sacabambaspis, a type of arandaspid fish that inhabited the shallow water on the edge of a supercontinent known as Gondwana. This ancient continent covered parts of the world currently known as South America, Africa, Australia, China and the Arabian Peninsula.

This discovery showed that arandapsids were present around the entire margin of the continent 450 million years ago. This suggests that the origins and evolutionary history of these fish are more complex than previously thought.