If you go down to the ancient swamp today you ’ll be sure of a big surprise . Which is precisely what happen to investigator in Namibia who have identify a giant salamander - like ancient beastie with huge fanged tooth and a header that was over half a meter long .
Found in the Gai - as Formation in the Ugab River vale in Damaraland Namibia , researchers discovered a stain fresh species they ’ve namedGaiasia jennyae , after both the constitution and a fossilist named Jenny Clack who specialized in theseearly tetrapods . This find of the fogey was something of a surprisal to the team .
“ When we find this enormous specimen just lying on the rock outcrop as a giant concretion , it was really shocking . I live just from seeing it that it was something completely different . We were all very aroused , ” read Claudia Marsicano , co - lead generator of the field , in astatement .
The fossil is thought to be around 280 million years old.Image Credit: C. Marsicano
The team actually hear four total specimens include a specially well - preserved skull and rachis . This permit the squad to think more about the bionomics of this species as well as what the area was like whenGaiasia jennyaewas alive . The gravid mesh teeth hint thatG. jennyaewas a largeambush predatorthat would have consumed Pisces within the lake .
“ Gaiasia jennyaewas considerably big than a soul , and it probably hung out near the bottom of swamps and lakes . It ’s got a big , categoric , toilet seat - shaped head , which allows it to open up its mouth and suck in prey . It has these vast fangs , the whole front of the mouth is just giant tooth , ” said Jason Pardo , an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the Field Museum in Chicago and the co - lead generator of the written report .
Multiple specimens also allowed the squad to compareGaiasia jennyaeto other known mintage from this age . This help them expose thatG. jennyaeis around 280 million twelvemonth old , and so hails from the at sea supercontinentGondwana . The skull is the most telling part of the dodo with large interlocking tooth that curve backwards on both the lower and upper jaws . The top of the skull even possess strange patterns .
“ After analyse the skull , the structure of the front of the skull catch my care . It was the only clearly seeable part at that time , and it showed very unusually mesh large fang , creating a alone bite for early tetrapods , ” preserve Marsicano .
Gaiasia jennyaeis so one-time that the squad think the specimen is a bow tetrapod , one of the earlier craniate ancestors before the crest groups of mammals , birds , and reptiles became truly established . Stem tetrapods possess four ramification , and were among the earliest ascendant of modern - 24-hour interval species .
“ Gaiasiais a stem tetrapod – it ’s a hangover from that early group , before they evolved and split into the groups that would become mammal and bird and reptilian and amphibians , which are call up crown tetrapods , ” say Pardo . “ It ’s really , really surprising thatGaiasiais so archaic . It was related to organism that went nonextant in all probability 40 million year prior ” .
They also believe that the specimen was big enough to be the primary vulture of the ecosystem in which it lived .
Namibia today looks very different from the Namibia of 300 million year ago . The area would have been much further south , even with the northernmost point of Antarctica . The land would have been swampy closer to the poles with ice and glaciers , although nearer the equator forest were set out to look as the Earth neared the end of an ice years .
“ The fact that we foundGaiasiain the far south tells us that there was a flourishing ecosystem that could support these very large predators . The more we look , we might find more answers about these major beast group that we worry about , like the ancestor of mammalian and modern reptile , ” finished Pardo .
The paper is print inNature .
