thecoffeeisblack: Final for Koolasuchus cleelandi. In 1978 a jawbone was found in southeastern Aust

thecoffeeisblack:

Final for Koolasuchus cleelandi. In 1978 a jawbone was found in southeastern Australia belonging to a giant amphibian; this in itself was not unusual as amphibians have been found throughout huge swathes of the fossil record, some getting to be downright gigantic among the particular order that this beast belonged to, known as the Temnospondyls.

These creatures were some of the first complex vertebrates to venture on land, doing so as far back as the Carboniferous period and thriving in locations across the Earth throughout the Permian, and into the age of the dinosaurs.

What is interesting is that Koolasuchus was possibly the last of it’s kind, a relic of a bygone era living it’s last days in the Early Cretaceous marking the end of a 210 million year reign. What’s more is that it was an arctic predator, spending it’s time ambushing small dinosaurs and other animals from beneath the bubbling waters of the forest streams that ran through what would later become the region of Victoria, Australia, which was below the Antarctic Circle at the time.

Despite this it’s environment was much more temperate than that of the miles of icy desert found at our southern pole in modern day, while it was cooler by Cretaceous standards, the temperatures had a much warmer global average than they do today.

Koolasuchus cleedandi was officially named in 1997 after paleontologist Lesley Kool (and partially for the “cool” environment it lived in) and geologist Mike Cleeland. Although it has a body similar to that of a modern salamander, it wasn’t exactly a harmless newt, at 16 feet and length and over 1,100 pounds it had a viscous bite and would have been an effective hunter in it’s polar environment, laying in wait like crocodiles do today.