An investigation into a taxon of crocodile-like creatures sizes up several large species.
— a taxon of primitive amphibians that lived around 330 million to 120 million years ago and looked a lot like crocodiles — came in a variety of sizes. For one of the first times, the study authors say that some of these ancient amphibians were actually as massive as pygmy hippopotamuses.“The size of an animal is important for many aspects of their life,” says Lachlan Hart, a study author and a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, in a.
As a result, scientists study the mass of all sorts of species, whether extant or extinct, to learn about their lifestyles. That said, while measuring the mass of an extant species is easy enough, paleontologists are all too familiar with the troubles involved in estimating the mass of an extinct species.
“We can’t just weigh them like we could with a living thing,” Hart says in a press release. “We only have the fossils to tell us what an animal looked like, so we often need to look at living animals to get an idea about soft tissues, such as fat and skin.” Hart and his fellow authors tested 19 techniques on several modern species to confirm their fitness for the ancient amphibians. They aimed to identify a more accurate approach for approximating the mass of the temnospondyls, a “strange” taxon that sometimes evolved “to enormous sizes.” They then applied the most fitting methods to two massive temnospondyls,
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