A species of giant salamander has been found in what was thought to be a glacial ecosystem.

Jayasia GeneaA newly discovered reptile predator with a body length of up to 4.5 metres (15 feet), it lived in swamps and lakes around 280 million years ago. Its broad, flat head held powerful jaws filled with massive fangs, ready to slay any prey unlucky enough to swim by.

The problem is, as far as we know, this species was never supposed to be that big, it was supposed to have gone extinct tens of millions of years before it apparently lived, and it was never supposed to be found in northern Namibia.Jayasia “It’s the first really good look we’ve gotten at a completely different ecosystem that we didn’t expect to find,” says Jason Pardo, a postdoctoral fellow at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Pardo is a co-author of a study on Jayasia Genea A discovery recently published in the journal Nature.

common origin

“Tetrapods are animals that emerged from the water about 380 million years ago, and maybe a little earlier,” Pardo explains. These ancient creatures, also known as stem tetrapods, were the common ancestors of modern reptiles, amphibians, mammals and birds. “These animals lived until what we call the end of the Carboniferous period, about 370-300 million years ago. A few survived, and lasted longer, but most went extinct about 370 million years ago,” he says.

This is why it was discovered Jayasia Genea The discovery of a dinosaur in the 280-million-year-old rocks of Namibia was nothing short of astonishing. Not only was the dinosaur extinct when the rocks in which it was found were deposited, but it had dominated the ecosystem as a top predator. By today’s standards, it was like finding an isolated island hosting animals that should have been dead for 70 million years, like a living, breathing T. rex.

“Skull Gaysia “We found that it was about 67 centimeters long. We also found the front part of its upper body. We know that it was at least 2.5 meters long, maybe 3.5 or 4.5 meters long – a large head and a long body like a salamander,” Pardo told Ars. Gaysia It was a suction feeder: it opened its jaws underwater, creating a vacuum that sucked its prey directly in. But the large, interlocking fangs reveal that a powerful bite was also one of its weapons, probably used to hunt larger animals. “We suspect that Gaysia It feeds on bony fish and freshwater sharks, and possibly even other smaller fish. Gaysia“It was a relatively slow, ambush-based predator,” Pardo says.

But given where it was found, the fact that there was enough prey to attack it is perhaps more shocking than the animal itself.

Location, location, location

“The continents were organized differently 270 to 280 million years ago,” Pardo says. At that time, a supercontinent called Pangaea had already split into two supercontinents. The northern supercontinent, Laurasia, included parts of modern North America, Russia and China. The southern supercontinent, home to GaysiaGondwana consisted of present-day India, Africa, South America, Australia, and Antarctica. Gondwana was very cold at that time.

“Some researchers assume that the entire continent was covered in glacial ice, just as we saw in North America and Europe during the ice ages 10,000 years ago,” says Pardo. “Others argue that it was more variable—there were patches where there was no ice.” However, 280 million years ago, northern Namibia was located at 60 degrees south latitude—roughly where the northernmost continent of Antarctica is today.

Historically, we thought that tetrapods [of that time] They lived like modern crocodiles. They were cold-blooded, and if you’re cold-blooded the only way to grow big and stay active is to live in a very hot environment. We thought that animals like that couldn’t live in colder environments. Jayasia “This shows that this is not the case at all,” Pardo claims. And it turns much of what we knew about life on Earth upside down. Gaysiait’s time.