Prehistoric animal fossils, discovered during a road construction project in 2012 in Lorestan Province (in western Iran), was unveiled on Wednesday. Anna Esmaeili, an archeologist at the Department of Environment’s Natural History Museum and Genetic Archive Office, said the fossils are about 7 million years old, meaning they belong to the late Miocene to the early Pliocene epochs. The fossils were excavated in Nourabad, 70 kilometers from Lorestan City. “The site is rich in ancient fossils, first of which was discovered in 2013,” Esmaeili was quoted as saying by Mehr News Agency. The fossils include pieces of vertebrates’ skeleton, such as equidae species (horse family), bovidae species (cloven-hoofed, ruminant mammals), carnivores and generally mammals native to arid habitats. The discovered pieces were structurally similar to those found in Maragheh in northwestern Iran about 40 years ago.
