Ancient Reptile Had a Hammer-Shaped Head
Posted on May 16, 2016
Scientists recently discovered two fossilized specimens of an ancient reptile that had an unusual hammer-shaped skull. The reptile lived about 242 million year ago. It is the first known vegetarian marine reptile.
Scientists have named the creature Atopodentatus unicus. Researchers believed the animal used its oddly shaped jaw to feed on underwater plants.The researchers told BBC News they used Plah-Doh to build a model of the jaw. Olivier Rieppel of the Field Museum in Chicago says, "To figure out how the jaw fit together and how the animal actually fed, we bought some children's clay, kind of like Play-Doh, and rebuilt it with toothpicks to represent the teeth. We looked at how the upper and lower jaw locked together, and that's how we proceeded and described it."
The ancient marine reptile was about 3 meters (9.8 feet long). The drawing below shows how it likely fed on plants at the bottom of the sea. A research paper on the ancient reptile was published here in the journal, Science Advances.
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