Museum Uncovers an Ancient Fossil in Storage

A toothless, two-legged crocodile ancestor that walked upright and had a beak instead of teeth was discovered in the basement of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, according to a report published Wednesday.

The 210-million-year-old fossil had sat in storage at the museum for about 60 years and was found only by accident, according to the report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a British science journal.

The 6-foot-long fossil is an archosaur, an extinct type of animal that includes the ancestors of dinosaurs, crocodilians and birds. The species was named Effigia okeeffeae after the painter Georgia O’Keefe, who had an interest in the quarry where the fossil was found.