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The 240-million-year-old fossil’s neck has 32 separate vertebrae, longer than its body and tail combined.National Museums of Scotland
Newly-discovered fossils have allowed scientists to reveal a 240-million-year-old “dragon” fossil in its entirety for the first ever time, 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 but, after detecting five newer specimens for ten years, scientists were able to depict the entire creature, which is named Dinocephalosaurus orientalis.
This spectacular new dragon fossil has allowed scientists to see the full anatomy of this bizarre prehistoric beast.
Dr Nick Fraser, from National Museums Scotland, who was member of the international team that studied the fossil, said this was the very first time scientists had been able to see it in full. He described it as “a very strange animal”.
That fossil helped illuminate this mysterious creature and an international team of researchers from Scotland, Germany, the USA and China published their findings in the journal Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Stephan Spiekman, a postdoctoral researcher based at the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History, added that the team hopes future research will help unveil more about the evolution of this group of animals, in particular how the extraordinarily long neck functioned.
The neck has 32 separate vertebrae — longer than the creature’s body and tail combined — and presumably played a key role in feeding, according to a study published by the Cambridge University Press.
“I’m still baffled by the function of the long neck,” Fraser said. “The only thing that I can come up with is that they were feeding in the waters that had rocks, and maybe crevices, in them. And they were using their long necks to probe and move into some of these crevices and maybe get prey that way.”
Fish are still preserved in the stomach region of one fossil, indicating that it was well-adapted to a marine environment, and its flippered limbs reinforce that hypothesis, researchers said in their paper.
They added that the Dinocephalosaurus’ long neck resembled another ancient, and equally baffling, marine reptile Tanystropheus hydroides.
“As paleontologists, we use modern-day analogs to understand life in the past. For Dinocephalosaurus and Tanystropheus, there is no modern-day analog,” Fraser said, adding that researchers can compare creatures such as ichthyosaurs to their modern day counterparts like tuna and dolphins.
