A team led by Asst. Vladimir Nikolov from the National Museum of Natural History at BAS (NMNHS-BAS) published the description of the first fossil remains of armoured gars in Bulgaria in the specialized scientific journal Cretaceous Research. The fossils are about 83 million years old and were discovered in the dinosaur locality near the town of Tran in the period 2020-2023.
Co-authors of Asst. Vladimir Nikolov are Dr. Plamen Andreev (Research Center of Natural History and Culture, Qujing Normal University, China), geology student Georgi Voykov (Sofia University) and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Docho Dochev (Sofia University). The studied fossil material includes 9 teeth and 3 scales of placoderm gars found in the Tran locality which are one of the few in Europe that are older than 80 million years and currently mark the easternmost point of the distribution of these fish within the European archipelago. The Tran fossils are also the first records of freshwater Mesozoic fishes found in Bulgaria.
Link to the electronic version of the scientific publication in the ScienceDirect portal with publicly available abstract and introduction: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195667124001587
The research was funded by the Bulgarian National Science Fund, Ministry of Education and Science. Field research in the period 2020-2022 was financially supported by The Jurassic Foundation, Karoll Knowledge Foundation, Murgana Geology Consultancy Group Ltd and United Bulgarian Bank.
