Colossal, car-sized salamander ruled prehistoric rivers

An international team of scientists announced a new species – an amphibious predator that lived in the Triassic period – after discovering a prehistoric mass grave in Portugal.

|
Steve Brusatte/Richard Butler/Octavio Mateus/Seb Steyer
A salamander creature that lived between 220 million and 230 million years ago would've been the size of a small car.

A small-car-size "super salamander" with a toilet-seat-shaped head may have perished some 220 million to 230 million years ago alongside hundreds of its kin when its lake home dried up, researchers say.

An international team of scientists found several skulls and various other bones — including those of the arm, shoulder and backbone of the amphibian, now called Metoposaurus algarvensis — in an ancient lake bed in southern Portugal. From these bones, the researchers determined that the creature was a new species of metoposaurid, an extinct group of large amphibians.

"Most modern amphibians are pretty tiny and harmless. But back in the Triassic, these giant predators would have made lakes and rivers pretty scary places to be," study co-author Richard Butler, of the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. [See Images of the Super Salamander and Its Fossils]

Like other metoposaurids, the amphibian sported a big, broad skull and hundreds of sharp teeth. When its jaws were snapped shut, the beast's head "really looks like a toilet seat," said study co-author Steve Brusatte, of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The skull was "circular-shaped with very thin, flat upper and lower jaws," and it would've flapped around this skull, snagging fish in the area's rivers and lakes, he added. Its puny arms and legs meant it likely couldn't move around much on land and thus would have spent much of its time in the water, Brusatte said.

Because the animals seem to have died together, the bones from several individuals were preserved. "We have a site where a lot of these animals died together and were preserved together," Brusatte told Live Science. "So, basically, it's a mass graveyard." The scientists have excavated just a portion of the site and plan to continue digging there.

When the salamanderlike animal was alive, the supercontinent Pangaea was just starting to break apart, and the animal's home would have sat along a rift valley where the continent was unzipping. Plenty of rivers and lakes fed into such a rift valley, Brusatte said.

"These amphibians would've ruled the rivers and swamps and lakes," in the area, he said. And while the amphibian would not have chased after large dinosaurs or mammals, the smaller individuals in these groups likely steered clear of the amphibian predators, Brusatte suggested.

At the time, many of the animal groups that are alive today — including crocodiles, lizards and salamanders (M.algarvensis was a distant relative of today's salamanders) — were just getting their start. "Part of the fabric of that world were these huge amphibians [metoposaurids] — they lived all over the place, especially in the low latitudes," Brusatte said.

This creature, along with most metoposaurids and half of Earth's species, died out at the end of the Triassic period, about 201 million years ago. The mass extinction opened the door to the rise of the dinosaurs, scientists say.  

Brusatte and Butler — along with Octavio Mateus, of the New University of Lisbon in Portugal and J. Sebastien Steyer, of the French National Center for Scientific Research — detailed their discovery this week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Follow Jeanna Bryner on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescienceFacebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Copyright 2015 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Colossal, car-sized salamander ruled prehistoric rivers
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0324/Colossal-car-sized-salamander-ruled-prehistoric-rivers
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe