A series of terrifying and never-before-seen monsters on the planet have revealed themselves one after another, showing that Earth and its complex evolutionary tree are still a huge mystery.
1. The “hybrid” sea monster of the “fossil ocean” Wyoming
Face like a crocodile, neck like a snake, body like a dinosaur, fins as big as a monstrous fish – that’s the description of Serpentisuchops pfisterae, a completely new species of snake-headed lizard identified by US scientists after 27 years. year “locked” in the museum with a mistaken classification.
Strange snake-headed lizard in the US – Photo: Scott Persons, Street & Kelley
The team of authors led by Dr. Walter Scott Persons IV from Charleston University in South Carolina called the animal they recreated a “strange, unique beast, a cross between two species”, referring to only its crocodile face.
According to SciTech Daily, it is essentially a plesiosaurs snake-headed lizard, which lived about 101 to 66 million years ago, with a neck up to 7 m long although the body is not very large.
2. Brazil’s “Triassic Frankenstein”
According to Sci-News, an almost complete right hind limb of a strange “petrified” animal from the Triassic period has helped scientists complete the fossil record and identify a new, mixed-looking species. peculiarities of many different species. It has been named Stenoscelida aurantiacus and belongs to the family Proterochampsidae – a large extinct family of reptiles endemic to South America.
“Frankenstein of the Triassic” – Photo: Matheus Fernandes / Universidade Federal de Santa Maria.
The team led by paleontologist Rodrigo Temp Müller from the Federal University of Santa Maria (Brazil) recreated this creature and produced a picture of a monster with a massive body like a dinosaur, with a head like that of a dinosaur. Crocodiles, forelimbs and hind legs are like limbs of a muscular man, feet are like dinosaurs, but the front paws have 5 toes like a hand in a study published in November 2021.
3. T-rex .’s rival
In July 2022, scientists from the Ernesto Bachmann Museum of Paleontology and the National University of Río Negro (Argentina) announced a completely new dinosaur species named Meraxes gigas, weighing more than 4 tons, 11 m long. It was identified from fossils unearthed in the Huincul Formation in Las Campanas Canyon, Neuquén Province – Argentina.
Meraxes gigas – Photo: Carlos Papolio
Meraxes gigas is a carnivorous monster that looks quite like a T-rex tyrannosaur with strong hind legs, shrunken forelimbs and a large head with scary teeth. The unearthed specimen is 94 million years old, which means that it lived in the Cretaceous period, which was also the period of the T-rex boom. Despite being similar and belonging to the same large group called theropods, it and the T-rex belong to two very different branches of the dinosaur family tree.
4. Giant bear hybrid in France
It is an animal named Tartarocyon cazanavei, belonging to the Amphicyonid group, family Amphicyonidae, a group of carnivorous poisonous animals typical of ancient Europe. This creature that roamed the land of France 12 million years ago has a quaint appearance as if it was a direct cross between a dog and a bear, so it is colloquially called a bear-dog hybrid. It weighs up to 320 kg and is extremely aggressive.
Dog hybrid bear 12 million years ago in France – Photo: Denny Navarra
This completely extinct strain was studied by a team of scientists led by Dr Bastien Mennecart, a paleontologist from the Basel Museum of Natural History (Switzerland), published online in PeerJ in September. 6-2022
5. Otters hunt crocodiles
The reason is that the “monster” otter unearthed in the Shungura and Usno formations in the Lower Omo Valley – Northwest Ethiopia can be as big as a lion, weighing up to 200 kg.
Monster otters are compared in size with modern humans, southern apes and modern otters – Photo: Université de Poitiers.
Named Enhydriodon omoensis, this monster lived alongside our famous ancestor – the Southern apes – 3.5 to 2.5 million years ago. This is a new species of the extinct Enhydriodon otter and is the largest otter to ever walk the earth. When living by rivers, it is even able to hunt and eat crocodiles, turtles … thanks to its strong teeth and more like terrestrial animals than amphibians.