Steve Brusatte , a young paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, wrote an excellent and accessible work entitled The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. In it he tells us about one of the nicest discoveries related to fossils. The American scientist traveled to the Algarve , in Portugal, an area that during the Triassic was only 15 or 20 degrees north of the Earth’s equator, at that time with the continental masses still attached.
His goal was to learn more about the world inhabited by the first dinosaurs. An article put him on the trail: in the south of Portugal a German geologist had found fragments of skulls of ancient amphibians . The find was made during the 1970s and it seemed that no one else had paid attention to the location.
We do not know if it was due to ignorance or extreme enthusiasm, but Brussate traveled to Portugal at the end of the summer of 2009. Exploring the Algarve countryside in the middle of August is not among the best recommendations to spend a healthy trip and live a beautiful experience in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula. But Brusatte did not stop to think about the heat that he would have to endure and went to the area together with Richard Butler and Octávio Mateus , a prominent Portuguese dinosaur hunter.
fossils in the sun
It is true that the trio of paleontologists was looking for fossils of animals that had lived in the driest and warmest area of Pangea , so they could feel in their own flesh an environment similar to that of those living beings. The problem is that the human being is not as prepared to resist in this ecosystem as the animals that had millions of years to adapt to the conditions were.
They spent a week doing daily fieldwork, searching sun-baked hills for dinosaur remains. They were barely able to find small, practically useless fossils, but before giving up and accepting the failure of the expedition, they decided to try one more day.
The thermometer showed 50 degrees and, after an hour of prospecting, they had another brilliant idea: to separate to cover more territory in which to look for fossils. As Brusatte tried to find the source of the scattered bone fragments, he heard screams coming from the top of a hill. The accent of that excited voice made her understand that it was the Portuguese Octavio. But as he climbed up to the place of screaming, all was suddenly silent. He thought that the heat was making him imagine things, but it didn’t take him long to see Octavio walking hesitantly with his hands over his eyes. When the Portuguese saw his teammate Steve, he seemed to recover his energy and shouted again: “I found him, I found him”. Octavio had forgotten his bottle of water and the combination of dehydration and excitement made him pass out momentarily. But, better than his bottle of water, Octávio had a bone in his hand: he had found the fossil remains of an amphibian .
This was the Metoposaurus
For several years they returned to the site to dig and study the find. It turned out that not only was there a fossil, but a half meter thick layer of slate was full of fossils. Hundreds of amphibians had fossilized there, leaving a chaotic puzzle of swirling bones and skeletons. The fossils belonged to a species of amphibian called Metoposaurus , similar to modern salamanders but the size of a car.
Apparently, 230 million years ago, a herd of these animals died due to a climate change that dried up the lake in which they lived. These huge amphibians were dangerous predators in the Triassic . They moved along the banks of rivers and lakes. They stalked any prey that dared approach their territory. Its enormous head was made up of two wide, flat jaws, hinged at the rear, like crocodiles, so that it could open its mouth at a wide angle and attack with hundreds of sharp teeth.
Worthy of a science fiction movie with touches of horror, but Metoposaurus existed and is among the ancestors of today’s toads, newts and salamanders (now smaller, luckily for us). In that world in which the Pangea supercontinent was yet to break apart, the climate was extreme and violent. Many species evolved throughout the 50 million years that the Triassic lasted. But one of the animal families was taking control. It didn’t take long (geological, of course) for the Earth to be dominated by dinosaurs. Until then, Metoposaurus lived as one of the kings of the riverbanks.
References:
Brusatte, S. et all. 2015. A new species of Metoposaurus from the Late Triassic of Portugal and comments on the systematics and biogeography of metoposaurid temnospondyls. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 35, 3, e912988. DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2014.912988.
Brusatte, S. 2019. Auge y caída de los dinosaurios. La nueva historia de un mundo perdido. Debate.
