In what could be one of the most important discoveries in understanding the link between early reptiles and modern birds and crocodiles, scientists have found a fossil in Brazil that could fill the evolutionary gap.
Named the Teyujagua paradoxa — after the mythological Teyu Yagua monster that had the head of a dog — this small beast didn’t grow any larger than five feet and certainly didn’t have any doglike features, but its importance to science can’t be overstated, according to a University of Birmingham statement.
An international team of scientists from Brazil and the United Kingdom have aged Teyujagua paradoxa at 250 million years old. They found it in southern Brazil.
The age of the creature is important, because it would mean the animal lived after the Permo-Triassic mass extinction when a massive volcanic eruption in eastern Russian wiped out 90 percent of life on Earth.
This reptile may have been an ancestor to archosauriforms, which eventually led about to dinosaurs ruling the Earth, and eventually to modern-day crocodiles and birds.
“The discovery of Teyujagua was really exciting,” Dr. Felipe Pinheiro, from Universidade Federal do Pampa, São Gabriel, Rio Grande do Sul said in the statement. “Ever since we saw that beautiful skull for the first time in the field, still mostly covered by rock, we knew we had something extraordinary in our hands. Back in the lab, after slowly exposing the bones, the fossil exceeded our expectations. It had a combination of features never seen before, indicating the unique position of Teyujagua in the evolutionary tree of an important group of vertebrates.”
Added Dr. Richard Butler, from the University of Birmingham’s School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences: ‘Teyujagua is a really important discovery because it helps us understand the origins of a group of vertebrates called archosauriforms. Archosauriforms are spectacularly diverse and include everything from hummingbirds and crocodiles to giant dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex and Brachiosaurus. Teyujagua fills an evolutionary gap between archosauriforms and more primitive reptiles and helps us understand how the archosauriform skull first evolved.”