The predator, named Metoposaurus algarvensis, lived around 220 million years ago and likely ate mostly fish.
Project leader Steve Brusatte told Discovery News that the early amphibian “was a top predator during the time that dinosaurs were first evolving and beginning their march to dominance.”
“We think this ‘super salamander’ is a type of totally bizarre, otherworldly extinct animal,” added Brusatte, who is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences.
He and his team found the animal’s remains at the site of a former lake in southern Portugal. They believe Metoposaurus stomped around the region, living much like crocodiles do today.
It’s doubtful that many other predators dared to take on the big beast.
“This new amphibian looks like something out of a bad monster movie,” Brusatte said. “It was as long as a small car and had hundreds of sharp teeth in its big flat head, which kind of looks like a toilet seat when the jaws snap shut. It was the type of fierce predator that the very first dinosaurs had to put up with if they strayed too close to the water, long before the glory days of T. rex and Brachiosaurus.”
Metoposaurus appears to have been sensitive to changes in climate, however. The researchers think many died at the Portuguese site when the lake they inhabited dried up. This perhaps foreshadowed what was to come some 20 million years later.
At about 201 million years ago, there was a mass extinction event that wiped out most big amphibians like this. At this time, the supercontinent Pangea, which included all of the world’s present day continents, began to break apart.
The changes are significant for dinosaur fans, as the extinctions paved the way for dinosaurs to become the number one terrestrial predators.
Read more at Discovery News
No comments:
Post a Comment