2024-02-23 23:43:00
(CNN) — Newly discovered fossils have allowed scientists to fully reveal that of a 240-million-year-old “dragon,” National Museums Scotland (NMS) said in a statement on Friday.
The five-meter-long reptile, from the Triassic period in China, was first identified in 2003. However, following studying five more recent specimens over ten years, scientists were finally able to portray the complete creature, which bears the name of Dinocephalosaurus orientalis.
A fully articulated fossil, the last to come to light, offered a “beautiful complete specimen from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail,” said Dr Nick Fraser, National Science Officer at NMS and one of the researchers, in conversation with CNN.
“It is coiled in a kind of figure of eight and… it is very reminiscent of a Chinese dragon,” he explained.
That fossil helped shed light on this mysterious creature, and an international team of researchers from Scotland, Germany, the United States and China published their findings in the journal Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Professor Li Chun of the Beijing Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology was the first to discover the fossils in 2003. He was visiting a small village in Guizhou province, southern China, when he noticed a small vertebra in a slab of limestone, according to his colleague Fraser.
Local farmers then took Chun to another location where there were other pieces of that type of rock, and he began finding bone fragments and putting them together to discover this new species, Fraser added.
An artistic interpretation of the ancient sea creature. (Credit: Marlene Donelly)
Now, more recent fossils indicate that the creature had 32 vertebrae, which formed an extremely long neck that likely helped it fish, although scientists are still unsure of its precise function.
“I’m still baffled by the function of the long neck,” Fraser said. “The only thing I can think of is that they were feeding in waters that had rocks and maybe cracks in them. And they were using their long necks to probe and move toward some of these crevices and maybe capture prey that way,” he noted.
Fish are still preserved in the stomach region of one fossil, indicating that it was well adapted to the marine environment, and its finned limbs reinforce that hypothesis, the researchers explained in their paper.
They added that the long neck of the Dinocephalosaurus It resembled another ancient and equally puzzling marine reptile, the Tanystropheus hydroides.
“As paleontologists, we use modern analogues to understand life in the past. For Dinocephalosaurus y Tanystropheus, there is no modern analogue,” Fraser said. Also that researchers can compare creatures like ichthyosaurs with their modern counterparts like tuna and dolphins.
“So we’re still having some obstacles, as with many animals in the Triassic, because it really is a strange and wonderful world of all kinds of strange animals doing things that animals today don’t seem to do.”
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