It looked like a cross between a crocodile and a salamander - and definitely was not an animal to be messed with. Long before the dinosaurs or even the advent of the earliest true amphibians and reptiles, a unique creature called Whatcheeria was a genuine apex predator.
New research is providing a deeper understanding of Whatcheeria, which lived roughly 330 million years ago during the Carboniferous period and arose during a time of evolutionary experimentation and innovation that unfolded in the tens of millions of years after vertebrates first conquered the land.
Whatcheeria was an early tetrapod, as the first land vertebrates - animals with backbones - were known. These were the predecessors to today's land vertebrates - amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Spending much of its time in lakes and rivers, Whatcheeria reached about 7 feet long, making it the biggest bully on the block.
"It's a wonderfully weird beast," added study co-author Ben Otoo, a doctoral student in paleontology at the University of Chicago's Committee on Evolutionary Biology and the Field Museum, which holds the Whatcheeria remains in its collection. "You'd probably think it was a caiman if you saw it, or maybe a big salamander. It didn't have scales and had a tall and narrow skull instead of a flat one.
"Bones act as storybooks, recording information about animals while they're alive. And one of the important pieces of information that is recorded in bone is how fast the animal is growing," Whitney said.
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