Two years ago, researchers found a fossil belonging to a bizarre-looking, crocodile-sized reptile that appeared to have a flamingo-like beak. Now, despite the fact that the fossil of this nearly 250 million year old creature was poorly preserved, they know what this “beak” actually is.
In a new study published Friday in Science Advances, Olivier Rieppel, Rowe Family Curator of Evolutionary Biology at The Field Museum in Chicago, and his colleagues revealed that the odd structure is actually part of a hammerhead-shaped jaw apparatus used by the creature to consume plants on the ocean floor.
The creature, which is said to be the earliest known specimen of an herbivorous marine reptile to be discovered, lived 242 million years ago in what is now southern China, the study authors said. It was named Atopodentatus unicus (Latin for “unique strangely toothed”), and as Rieppel noted in a statement, this reptile was “a very strange animal.”
“It’s got a hammerhead, which is unique, it’s the first time we’ve seen a reptile like this.” he said. Along with paleontologists from Scotland and China, and with the assistance of a child’s toy, he was able to discern what the creature looked like and how it used its odd shaped head to procure sustenance.
How Play-Doh helped the researchers solve a biological mystery
As Rieppel explained, “To figure out how the jaw fit together and how the animal actually fed, we bought some children’s clay, kind of like Play-Doh, and rebuilt it with toothpicks to represent the teeth. We looked at how the upper and lower jaw locked together, and that’s how we proceeded and described it.”
Thanks to their efforts, he and his fellow paleontologists were able to determine that the wide jaw of the Atopodentatus unicus was shaped like a hammerhead, and that it had peg-like teeth along the edges. Further into its mouth, the shape of the teeth changed, becoming more needle-like. Based on the structure of the jaw, the study authors conclude that it was used to help the reptile eat plants.
“It used the peg-like front teeth to scrape plants off of rocks on the sea floor, and then it opened its mouth and sucked in the bits of plant material,” Rieppel said. “Then, it used its needle-like teeth as a sieve, trapping the plants and letting the water back out, like how whales filter-feed with their baleen.”
“The jaw structure is clearly that of an herbivore. It has similarities to other marine animals that ate plants with a filter-feeding system, but Atopodentatus is older than them by about eight million years,” he added. Based on that conclusion, this new specimen represents the earliest known species of herbivorous marine reptile, the researchers said. Furthermore, it shows that creatures living in the days following the Permian-Triassic extinction some 252 million years ago were able to adapt and rebound more quickly than previously believed.
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Image credit: The Field Museum
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