Research on a recovered fossil first found in the Kimberley region in the 1960s has changed how experts understand the Aphanerama, a crocodile-like dinosaur.
When three skull fossils were first unearthed on Noonkanbah Station, nearly 2,500 kilometres from Perth, palaeontologists identified them as fragments of the Erythrobatrachus species of the temnospondyls group. Over the next 50 years, these fragments were separated and sent to museums around the world. Eventually, they were lost.
Thankfully, the Western Australian Museum retained a plaster cast of one of the fossils, which was being studied by palaeontologist and UNSW lecturer, Dr Lachlan Hart, when one of the pieces was located in a museum in Berkeley, in the US.
Using modern technology, he was able to compare the two fragments, and realised that they belonged to two different species of the temnospondyls order: Erythrobatrachus and Aphaneramma.
While both would have been around the same size, with skulls around 40 centimetres long, the shape of these fragments suggested different diets and hunting strategies.
While the broad head of the Erythrobatrachus would have made it a top predator, the long, thin snout of the Aphaneramma suggests it adapted to catch small fish. Both creatures are identifiable by their crocodile head and salamander body.
According to Dr Hart, these marine amphibians would have travelled across the world from Norway to the Kimberley 250 million years ago. Fossils have been found in rocks around the world, some even less than one million years after the mass extinction event at the end of the Permian period, known as the Great Dying.
“Temnospondyls are a really important group of animals because they survived two of the big five mass extinction events that have happened in Earth’s history,” Dr Hart says.
“Including the largest one that ever happened, and that’s where about 90 per cent of all living things were wiped out.”
He believes this decades-long mistake is likely not the only time fossils have been misidentified. In fact, there are probably lots of fossils sitting in museums that researchers don’t know about.
Luckily, collection techniques and studies are much more advanced now, making it much easier to ensure that the proper identification and preservation is being carried out.
“We are very careful to document every piece that we get from the field and where it ends up,” Dr Hart says.
Can’t get enough of these ancient marine amphibians? To discover more modern and ancient aquatic animals, click here.