January 13, 2021
On April 27, 2019, local fossil enthusiasts Stephen Groff and Marcus Jones found a partial skull of a fossil fish along Calvert Cliffs. Little did they know at the time that it would turn out to be the find of a lifetime.
Using a microscope, needles, and fine brushes, Groff carefully removed the entombing sediments from around the 10 million-year-old bones to reveal a true treasure. This fossil-find consisted of the bony braincase of a cobia – the first ever found in the fossil record. The only known species of living cobia is a marine inhabitant that occurs nearly worldwide in a variety of tropical, subtropical, and warm temperate habitats and occasionally enter estuaries, feeding on crustaceans, cephalopods (squid and their kin), and other fishes. The hand-sized fossilized partial skull was different enough from the living cobia that a new species was named in honor of Groff and Jones, and published recently in the Journal of Paleontology.