Salamander From Hell

On the heels of the walking crododile from hell, we now have a car-sized salamander from a lake bed in Portugal.  The animal, named Metoposaurus algarvensis, is dated to the Triassic,and died out sometime around160 mya. Until then, as the story notes:

"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.

Here is the artist's rendering from the LiveScience story.

As one commenter put it, it is very hard to incorporate this kind of animal into a creationist perspective. How would something like this not have been mentioned in the Bible? Or, for that matter, the snake from hell, the crocodiles from hell (all three of them) or the frog from hell?And that isn't even counting the tyrannosaurids. 

The Frog From Hell!

A fossilized frog has been found in Madagascar. The story, from the BBC, states:

The creature would have been the size of a "squashed beach ball" and weighed about 4kg (9lb), the researchers said. They added that the fossil, nicknamed Beelzebufo or "frog from hell", was "strikingly different" from present-day frogs found on the island nation.

The researchers are puzzled as to how it got where it did but it is suggested that a land bridge at Antarctica (which was warmer than now) would have provided the conduit. Here is the image of what the frog probably looked like from National Geographic and how it compares to a modern frog.


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Crocodile From Hell

First we had the Frog From Hell, then we had the Snake From Hell and now, it seems, that we have the Crocodile From Hell.   National Geographcic is reporting that a 60 million year-old crocodile has been found not far from Titanoboa.  Christine Dell'Amore writes:

A Colombian coal mine where scientists found the largest known snake species has offered up another gem: A new species of 20-foot-long (6-meter-long) prehistoric croc. (See pictures of Titanoboa, the biggest snake ever found.)
The 60-million-year-old Acherontisuchus guajiraensis lived alongside the snake and a bevy of other reptiles in an Amazon-like river system, which wove through one of Earth's earliest rain forests before eventually emptying into what's now the Caribbean Sea.

There are no primates alive at this point (Plesiadapis has been demoted to tree shrew). Good thing, too. I doubt this would have been a fun place to live.

The Snake from Hell

First we had the "Frog from Hell." Now we have the "Snake from Hell." The fossilized remains of a snake have been discovered in Colombia that was absurdly large. The story, in Scientificblogging, notes:

Surrounded by huge trucks extracting coal from Cerrejon, one of the world's largest open-pit mines, researchers discovered fossilized bones of super-sized snakes and their prey, crocodiles and turtles, in the Cerrejon Formation, along with fossilized plant material from the oldest known rainforest in the Americas, which flourished at the site 58-60 million years ago.

Estimated Titanoboa size: 42 feet (13 meters); 1140 kilograms. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the longest snake ever measured was 10 meters (33 feet) in length. The heaviest snake, a python, weighed 183 kilograms (403 pounds).

The graphic from the Nature article shows the vertebrae of the critter:



Just after the first vertebra in the picture is, for comparison, the vertebebra of a modern 13-foot boa. Look at the size difference!! The snake is being called Titanoboa cerrojonensis. The last paragraph of the recent article in Nature reads:

Discovery of Titanoboa and the additional Cerrejon Formation fossil record indicates that components of modern neotropical riverine vertebrate faunas were assembled at most six to seven million years after the Cretaceous–Palaeogene extinction event.

Evolution moved fast. Here is the Nature citation:

Head JJ, Block JI, Hastings AK, Bourque JR, Cadena EA, Herrera FA, Polly D, Jaramillo CA (2009) Giant boid snake from the Palaeocene neotropics reveals hotter past equatorial temperatures. Nature 457(7230):715-718.

Penguin From Hell

Okay, probably not nearly on the level of the Frog From Hell or the Snake From Hell, but coming into contact with a six-foot penguin would be quite something.  From the NPR Story:
An international team of scientists have announced the discovery of a previously unknown species of prehistoric penguin.

The bird waddled around off the east coast of New Zealand between 55 and 60 million years ago. And it was a giant as far as penguins go. The researchers estimate that it probably weighed about 220 pounds and was around 5 feet 10 inches tall.

"That's about as tall as a medium-sized man," says Gerald Mayr, a paleontologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Franfurt, Germany, and the lead author of the new study published today in Nature Communications. "This particular specimen is one of the largest known fossil penguins."

The largest living penguin, on the other hand, the Emperor penguin, is a good bit shorter — around 4 feet.

The scientists have named the new species Kumimanu biceae, which means 'monster bird' in the Maori language. (Kumi is the name of a monster in Maori mythology and manu means bird.)

Here is the image from the story:

(Image credit: Gerald Mayr)

National Geographic's Top Ten Discoveries of 2008

This is an interesting list, including dinosaurs, sea creatures and modern fauna. The best one is the "Frog from Hell" that I included in a post here.