UNDATED (WKRC) – Scientists have recently discovered the fossil of a salamander-like creature that they believe lived 40 million years before the first dinosaur.
On Wednesday, the Field Museum in Chicago released a publication detailing their discovery.
“Forty million years before the first dinosaurs evolved, a ferocious predator lurked in the swampy waters,” reads the article.
Gaiasia jennyae is a swamp creature with a skull over two feet long and massive fangs lining its interlocking jaw.
“Gaiasia jennyae was considerably larger than a person, and it probably hung out near the bottom of swamps and lakes,” said Jason Pardo, a United States National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Field Museum and co-lead author of the original study. “The whole front of the mouth is just giant teeth. It’s a big predator…”
A biologist from the University of Chicago who was unrelated to the project said, “It’s acting like an aggressive stapler.”
The team who made the original find were shocked to see the large creature atop an octopus fossil. They collected other specimen, realizing how large and fascinating the creature was.
“We had some really fantastic material, including a complete skull, that we could then use to compare with other animals from this age and get a sense of what this animal was and what makes it unique,” said Pardo.
Scientists believe Gaiasia jennyae lived during an ice age, but didn’t evolve to adapt to the warming world like many other species did. Despite this, the creature somehow persevered much longer than similar species.
“Gaiasia is a stem tetrapod — it’s a holdover from that earlier group, before they evolved and split into groups that would become mammals and birds and reptiles and amphibians, which are called crown tetrapods,” Pardo said. “It’s really, really surprising that Gaiasia is so archaic. It was related to organisms that went extinct probably 40 million years prior.”
Even more impressive is Gaiasia’s size. Surviving species from so many years ago often lived by hiding from predators and adapting to their environment. Gaiasia, on the other hand, is big and aggressive.
“Gaiasia is big, and it is abundant, and it seems to be the primary predator in its ecosystem,” said Pardo.
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