A terrifying 6-foot-long creature with bone-crushing jaws roamed Iowa 340 million years ago

While T.rex is often called the “king of the dinosaurs”, a new study has revealed that an equally ferocious predator roamed the Earth millions of years earlier.

Scientists from the Field Museum in Chicago have studied the remains of Whatcheeria – a six-foot-long lake creature that roamed Iowa 340 million years ago.

According to researchers, Whatcheeria had razor-sharp teeth and bone-crushing jaws that could snap animals in half.

“He probably would have spent a lot of time at the bottom of rivers and lakes, scurrying around and eating whatever he wanted,” said study co-author Ben Otoo. ‘You could definitely call this thing “the T. rex of its time”.’

To date, approximately 350 specimens of Whatcheeria have been discovered, all of which are housed in the Field Museum.

In their new study, the team sought to understand how the creature grew so large so quickly.

“If you saw Whatcheeria in life, it would probably look like a large, crocodile-like salamander with a narrow head and lots of teeth,” Otoo said.

“If he really rolled up, probably to an uncomfortable extent, he could fit in your tub, but neither you nor he would want him there.”

Whatcheeria lived underwater and was a “stem tetrapod” – a four-legged primitive creature that is part of the same lineage as humans.

“Whatcheeria is more closely related to living tetrapods like amphibians, reptiles, and mammals than anything else, but it’s not one of those modern groups,” said study co-author Ken Angielczyk.

“That means it can help us understand how tetrapods, including us, evolved.”

The team sifted through specimens at the Field Museum to study Whatcheeria at different stages of its life and track its growth.

“Examining these fossils is like reading a storybook, and we try to read as many chapters as possible examining how juveniles grow into adulthood,” said lead author Professor Megan Whitney. of the study.

“Due to Whatcheeria’s position in the tetrapod family tree, we wanted to target this animal and examine its storybook at different life stages.”

The team took thin slices of thigh bone and studied them under a microscope.

“By examining the thickness of the growth rings over an animal’s lifetime, you can determine whether the animal is growing continuously throughout its life, perhaps with a few temporary interruptions, or whether it is grows to adult size and then stops,” Otoo said. Explain.

The researchers expected to find that Whatcheeria exhibited slow and steady growth, much like reptiles and amphibians today.

However, thigh bone samples revealed that the creature grew rapidly when young, before stabilizing over time.

“If you’re going to be a top predator, a really big animal, it can be a competitive advantage to get big quickly because it’s easier to hunt other animals and harder for other predators to hunt you,” said said Stephanie Pierce. , co-author of the study.

“It can also be a beneficial survival strategy when living in unpredictable environments, such as the lake system inhabited by Whatcheeria, which has gone through seasonal periods of death.”

Researchers hope the findings will shed light on the evolution of early tetrapods.

“Evolution is about trying different lifestyles and combinations of features,” Dr. Angielczyk added.

“And so you get an animal like Whatcheeria which is an early tetrapod, but it’s also a pretty fast growing animal. It’s really a big one for its time.

“He has this weird skeleton that potentially allows him to do things that some of his contemporaries weren’t doing.

“It’s an experiment in how to be a top predator, and it shows how diverse life on Earth was and still is.”