The teeth of representatives of the animal world have a variety of shapes and sizes. And in the ancient crocodile-like creature from Antarctica, they were also located in a non-standard place: all over the palate
In the photo: This image clearly shows the teeth located along the entire upper part of the prehistoric animal's muzzle (photo by Christian Sidor).
Kryostega collinsoni lived on the ancient supercontinent Pangea between 360 and 200 million years ago. It belongs to the dark-spondyl - primitive amphibians, the ancestors of modern frogs and salamanders.
It differed from other representatives in the location of the teeth: not only along the edge of the oral cavity, but also on the palate (three rows in total).
A little background: the remains of the skeleton of an ancient creature (namely the jaw) were found in Antarctica back in 1996 by William Hammer from the American College of Augustana (Augustana College).
Frogodiles - roughly what they call temospondyls. The illustration also shows the site where the Kryostega collinsoni fossil was found in Antarctica (illustration by Christian Sidor).
As is often the case, it was not he himself who carefully studied and calculated the find, but his colleague Christian Sidor from the University of Washington in Seattle (University of Washington in Seattle).
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So, by the size of the nostrils, he was able to roughly determine the size of the animal's head: it turned out to be almost a meter long, 60 centimeters wide. The whole body could reach 4.5 meters. Thus, it turns out that this animal is the largest known to man and lived on the territory of Antarctica in the Triassic.
K. collinsoni was thought to have lived in water, as it had structures that could sense changes in water pressure around the body, similar to those found in fish and amphibians.
“The teeth of this creature are downright gigantic. We assume that it was a predator and could hunt large prey,”says Saydor.
The fact is that in other dark-spondylae, paleontologists found teeth on the palate, but earlier they only came across small specimens (much smaller than the current size, up to 3-4 centimeters). The teeth of the newly discovered creature most likely worked like fangs, holding the caught prey.
The bloodthirsty details do not end there. Saidor adds that it was unlikely that K. collinsoni chewed on the victim. Most likely, she either swallowed it whole, or first tore it into pieces and then swallowed it.
Details in the article by the authors of the discovery, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.