Kimberley, located in Western Australia’s north-west corner, is a region of mountains and gorges with long stretches red soil. Dry seasons can last for a long time, while wet seasons flood the Martuwarra Fitzroy River in the south of the Kimberley region.
If you traveled back 250 million years to the Early Triassic Period, you’d see an entirely different landscape.
The land back then was covered with brackish waters and looked more like a flat mud flat on the edge of a bay.
Dingoes, Rock Wallabies, and other animals that are common in the area today were not the creatures who inhabited this region. Strange amphibians called temnospondyls that looked like a mix between a crocodile and a salamander dominated the area during this time, eating fish and small animals.
New light is shed on these creatures by a new study that I and my colleagues have published in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. This study shows how these animals became an evolution success story for the very first time.
About 250 million years back, Roebuck Bay Bay, near Broome, was a brackish bay. Richard Wainwright/AAP
Find out what you’ve lost
In the 1960s, field trips to Noonkanbah Station, about 250 km inland from Broome, led paleontologists to discover fossils.
Temnospondyls have a long and varied lineage.
They have a fossil record that spans 210,000,000 years from the Carboniferous to the Cretaceous. These include animals from prehistory such as Eryops You can also find out more about the following: Koolasuchus. They are one of few groups of vertebrates that survived the mass extinctions of the Permian period and the Triassic Period.
Noonkanbah Station was the site of the discovery of a temnospondyl. Erythrobatrachus noonkanbahensis. Cosgriff & Garbutt named it in 1972 based on the three skull fragments that had been found during those 1960s field excursions.
The samples were then sent to many museum collections, both in Australia and America. They were eventually lost sometime in the next 50 years.
The Western Australian Museum had a plaster cast in high-quality of one of these pieces. Our team, however, was determined to learn more about the enigmatic pieces. One of these lost fossils was found in a US museum.
Two species from one
We could now look at the two pieces.
ErythrobatrachusWe could tell that the two temnospondyl species were different.
The fossil remained unique in its own right. Erythrobatrachus name. It was closer to a well-known and previously described temnospondyl named Aphaneramma.
The shape of the skulls revealed that the diet and hunting strategy of the two animals were different.
Erythrobatrachus Had a larger, robuster head.
It would have made a great predator.
AphanerammaThe snout of the resembled a small, long fish. Both animals lived together in the same environment, but they hunted different prey.
Erythrobatrachus, an ancient marine amphibian (foreground), and Aphaneramma in the background. Pollyanna von Knorring (Swedish Museum of Natural History)
A global spread
Amphibians are highly sensitive to the salt content of water. Amphibians do not like living in marine environments with high levels of salinity.
Temnospondyls, of the family Trematosauria.
Erythrobatrachus You can also find out more about the following: Aphaneramma Trematosaurids fossils found around the globe show that they were not bothered by seawater.
The fossils are not only of the earth. Aphaneramma Similar ages to Blina Shale have also been discovered in Svalbard in Russia, Pakistan, and Madagascar.
The fossils of trematosaurs, which are known as Great Dyings or the Permian mass extinction at the end the Permian Period are especially notable. They are located in rocks that date to less than one million years following the event.
It was by far the worst mass extinction event in Earth history.
You can confirm that Aphaneramma’s The fact that Australia was included in the range shows how these animals dispersed worldwide at the beginning of the Mesozoic period.
Our findings highlight the adaptability of temnospondyls.
The temnospondyls were able to adapt to extreme changes in climate and utilise many ecological niches. They are one of the evolution success stories.
