Giant salamander terrorised Earth 200 million years ago

A car-sized 'super salamander' with a toilet-seat-shaped head was among Earth's top predators more than 200 million years ago and may have feasted on the very first dinosaurs, scientists have found.
The previously undiscovered species of crocodile-like amphibian was identified after its bones buried on the site of an ancient lake in southern Portugal were excavated.
"This new amphibian looks like something out of a bad monster movie. It was as long as a small car and had hundreds of sharp teeth in its big flat head, which kind of looks like a toilet seat when the jaws snap shut," said Dr Steve Brusatte, of the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences, who led the study.

"It was the type of fierce predator that the very first dinosaurs had to put up with if they strayed too close to the water, long before the glory days of T rex and Brachiosaurus," Brusatte said.
The species was part of a wider group of primitive amphibians that were widespread at low latitudes 220-230 million years ago.
The creatures grew up to 2m in length and lived in lakes and rivers during the Late Triassic Period, living much like crocodiles do today and feeding mainly on fish, researchers said.

The species - Metoposaurus algarvensis - lived at the same time as the first dinosaurs began their dominance, which lasted for over 150 million years.

These primitive amphibians formed part of the ancestral stock from which modern amphibians - such as frogs and newts - evolved, researchers said.
The species were distant relatives of the salamanders of today, they said.
The discovery reveals that this group of amphibians was more geographically diverse than previously thought.
The species is the first member of the group to be discovered in the Iberian Peninsula, researchers said.
The new species was discovered in a large bed of bones where up to several hundred of the creatures may have died when the lake they inhabited dried up. Only a fraction of the site - around 4 square metres - has been excavated so far.

Most members of the group of giant salamander-like amphibians were wiped out during a mass extinction 201 million years ago, long before the death of the dinosaurs.
This marked the end of the Triassic Period, when the supercontinent of Pangea - which included all the world's present-day continents - began to break apart.
The extinction wiped out many groups of vertebrates, such as big amphibians, paving the way for dinosaurs to become dominant.
The study was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.