WASHINGTON: It looked like a cross between a crocodile and a salamander — and definitely was not an animal to be messed with. Long before the dinosaurs or even the advent of the earliest true amphibians and reptiles, a unique creature called Whatcheeria was a genuine apex predator.

New research is providing a deeper understanding of Whatcheeria, which lived roughly 330 million years ago during the Carboniferous period and arose during a time of evolutionary experimentation and innovation that unfolded in the tens of millions of years after vertebrates first conquered the land.

After a close examination of its fossilised bones, scientists were surprised to find that Whatcheeria did not follow a slow-and-steady growth pattern during its life akin to many modern reptiles and amphibians but rather grew quickly while young, like birds and mammals.

Whatcheeria was an early tetrapod, as the first land vertebrates — animals with backbones — were known. These were the predecessors to today’s land vertebrates — amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Spending much of its time in lakes and rivers, Whatcheeria reached about 7 feet (2 metres) long, making it the biggest bully on the block.

“Whatcheeria was not a slow and sluggish oversized amphibian. It was this active predator that grew extraordinarily rapidly in its juvenile phase of life,” said paleontologist Megan Whitney of Loyola University in Chicago, lead author of the research published in the journal Communications Biology. Whatcheeria is known from nearly 400 fossils unearthed near the small Iowa town of What Cheer.

Published in Dawn, December 6th, 2022