The strange creature on the banks of the Jialing River, with an "armored" body and a body shaped like a large submarine, is one of the first representatives of the "age of monsters" after the great extinction of the Bipedal period.
According to Sci-News, the newly named marine reptile Prosaurosphargis yingzishanensi was revealed in a quarry in the Jialingjiang Formation in China, where several other ancient monsters have also been found.
Dating results show that it is 247 million years old, belonging to the early Triassic class of organisms, born after the previous mass extinction at the end of the Diapsid period.
The monster was found in a fossil-filled area next to China's Jialing River - (Photo: eLife).
The Triassic is the geological era that opened the "age of monsters" of the planet, lasting throughout the 3 Triassic - Jurassic - Cretaceous periods with the dominance of large reptiles such as dinosaurs on land, pterosaurs in the sky, mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs in the sea.
Paleontologist Jun Liu from Hefei University of Technology (China) and colleagues from Germany, Poland, and China studied the specimen, which is considered to be an iconic symbol of this extremely important transitional stage of the ecosystem.
"Several groups of reptiles invaded the marine kingdom as a result of the end-Climax extinction, the largest mass extinction in Earth's history," said Dr. Liu.
Unlike their ancestors who found their way from the ocean to the shore, Triassic marine reptiles were "reverse-path" creatures, evolving from Diapsid land creatures.
The invasion of the seas by reptiles may have been the result of the oceans being relatively quiet at the time, as the mass extinction wiped out most of the previous generation of aquatic life.
Among them, the ocean area now in China was one of the places that the primitive ancient marine reptiles chose.
The specimen found was part of the monster's body, showing that it had an "armored " body, including strong ribs extending across its back and heavy, thick leathery armor.
With a body length of about 1.5 m, it was a fairly large species in the world of monsters of the early Triassic period, which had not yet grown to the enormous size of the Cretaceous period.
The study was published online in the journal eLife.
