Researchers have discovered a new species of carnivorous reptile that walked the Earth before the existence of the dinosaurs.
The ancient creature, dubbed Nundasuchus, was nine-feet long and had teeth like steak knives, Virginia Tech reported. It was part of a class of large reptiles that lived before dinosaurs took over the world.
"The full name is actually Nundasuchus songeaensis," Sterling Nesbitt, an assistant professor of geological sciences in the College of Science and the newest addition to Virginia Tech's paleontology team, said. "It's Swahili mixed with Greek. The 'songeaensis' comes from the town, Songea, near where we found the bones.
"The reptile itself was heavy-bodied with limbs under its body like a dinosaur, or bird, but with bony plates on its back like a crocodilian."
The partial skeleton was first discovered in 2007, and since then the bones have been fit together piece by piece. A large number of bones were recovered, but most of the skull was not found. The creature was discovered in southwestern Tanzania when the researchers were looking for prehistoric relatives of birds and crocodiles.
"There's such a huge gap in our understanding around the time when the the common ancestor of birds and crocodilians was alive - there isn't a lot out there in the fossil record from that part of the reptile family tree," Nesbitt said. "This helps us fill in some gaps in reptile family tree, but we're still studying it and figuring out the implications."
Nesbitt noted even though the researchers were at the right place at the right time, the finding also required a vast amount of research on what types of animals inhabited certain regions and making geological maps on the best places to find fossils.
"Sometimes you know instantly if it's new and within about 30 seconds of picking up this bone I knew it was a new species," he said. "I had hoped to find a leg bone to identify it, and I thought, This is exactly why we're here' and I looked down and there were bones everywhere. It turns out I was standing on bones that had been weathering out of the rock for hundreds of years - and it was all one individual of a new species."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
