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Adam Striegel, a 23-year-old senior at the University of Pittsburgh, went on a field trip this past spring to study rocks.

This week, Striegel revels in the fame that comes with discovering the skull of a 300-million-year-old amphibian with a nasty set of teeth. The species' identification will bear his surname.

"This is all so weird to me. I can't believe it's all happening. It's like my 15 minutes of fame," he said, machine-gunning the words with excitement.

It all started in March, when the White Oak resident went on a field trip for his geology lab to an old road cut, west of Pittsburgh. His professor, Charles Jones, was describing different layers of rock.

"At one point, he said: 'Look around. You might find some plant fossils,' " Striegel recalled. "And I just reached down and picked up a rock about the size of my hand. I looked at it, and I thought I saw a little fern."

Thinking his teacher would not consider the rock worth keeping, Striegel pitched it. Then he walked to the top of the hill and, deciding to let Jones judge the merits of his discovery, retrieved it.

Fortunately, Striegel found it, and Jones immediately identified it as a skull. They took it to Carnegie Museum of Natural History in May. Officials of the Oakland museum recently identified the discovery.

The skull comes from a family of primitive amphibians called trematopids -- a group of land-loving, flesh-eating creatures about 3 feet long at the tail and a half-foot high, said Dave Berman, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie.

"It would be like a big salamander newt probably with rough skin," he said. "This is a very short-snouted animal with a boxy skull."

The skull is the size of a softball, with big eyes and nostrils. But its most prominent feature is the teeth. The roof of the mouth is lined with tusks about three-quarters of an inch long for holding and killing prey.

Berman said it's remarkable that anyone with untrained eyes could find an actual fossil. In 34 years, such a discovery has occurred to him only twice. The first time, an elementary student from Reedy, W.Va., found a reptile skull about 290 million years old.

The animal whose skull Striegel found lived 100 million years before the first dinosaurs. This marks the first time an animal from this family has been found in Pennsylvania and the third one from the Late Pennsylvania Era 300 million years ago.

The discovery is important, Berman said, because it represents not only a new species, but also a new genus.

Fossil finds such as Striegel's are rare in Pennsylvania and other Northeastern states.

"It's a lot of work looking for road cuts, especially when they're covered with poison ivy and big, black snakes," Berman said.

For his efforts, Striegel received an A in the class. He also will get a cast of the skull -- the real one stays at the Carnegie -- and his name on the new species, something flashy, such as "Striegeli."

Striegel said that when he becomes an elementary teacher, he can regale students bored with reading, writing and 'rithmetic with tales of his encounter with a 300-million-year-old amphibian with big, sharp teeth.

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