It is 240 million years old. This is reported by the National Museums of Scotland (NMS). Among them is the “dragon” fossil found in China.
The five-meter-long reptile belongs to the Triassic period in China. It was first identified in 2003. After ten years, scientists were finally able to portray the complete creature. Has the name of Dinocephalosaurus orientalis.
It is a fully articulated fossil. It is a “beautiful specimen complete from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail.” This was said by Dr. Nick Fraser, Head of National Sciences at the NMS. “It is coiled in a kind of figure of eight and is very reminiscent of a Chinese dragon,” he explained.
Long neck
That fossil helped shed light on this mysterious creature. The findings are in the journal Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Professor Li Chun was the first to discover the fossils in 2003. He noticed a small vertebra in a limestone slab, according to his colleague Fraser. He later found bone fragments and put them together to discover this new species.
More recent fossils indicate that the creature had 32 vertebrae. He had an extremely long neck which helped him fish. But scientists are still unsure of its precise function. “I'm still baffled by the function of the long neck,” Fraser said. “Maybe they were feeding in waters that had rocks and crevices. And their long necks would probe some of these crevices and maybe capture prey that way,” he noted.
Fish are still preserved in the stomach region of a fossil. It indicates that it was well adapted to the marine environment. Their finned limbs reinforce that hypothesis, the researchers explained in their paper. The long neck of the “dragon” fossil found in China HE It looks like another ancient and equally disconcerting marine reptile. He Tanystropheus hydroides.
No analogues
“We use modern analogues to understand life in the past. For these fossils there is no modern analogue,” Fraser said. Also that researchers can compare creatures like ichthyosaurs with their modern counterparts like tuna and dolphins. “So we are still having some obstacles, as with many animals in the Triassic. It really is a strange and wonderful world. “It's full of all kinds of strange animals that do things that today's animals don't seem to do.”
