The skull of a new species of creature dubbed "swamp monster" have been unearthed in Texas.
The skull is believed to be more than 200 million years old. Per a study, the skull belonged to a beast which lurked in the swamps of West Texas in the Triassic period. The creature is believed to be roughly 17-foot or 5.2 meters long, with a 2-foot or 0.6 meter snout.
According to scientists, the fossils of the creature are of a new species. The creature is a previously unknown type of Phytosaur, which is an extinct creature that once hunted fish and other prey near the shallow edges of lakes and rivers.
"They had basically the same lifestyle as the modern crocodile, by living in and around the water, eating fish, and whatever animals came to the margins of the rivers and lakes," study researcher Bill Mueller, assistant curator of paleontology at the Museum of Texas Tech University, said in a statement.
Paleontologists have dubbed the creature Machaeroprosopus lottorum after the Lott family, which owns the Texas Panhandle ranch where the skulls were unearthed in 2001.
"We found them in an area we'd been excavating in," Mueller said. "I think we've gotten four skulls out of that area already. Doug Cunningham found this specimen, and then we dug it up. When he found it, just the very back end of the skull was sticking out of the ground. The rest was buried. We excavated it and brought it into the museum to finish preparation."
The first of the two skulls which was discovered, said to be male, was not well preserved. However, a few weeks later Doug Cunningham, field research assistant at the Museum of Texas Tech University and co-author of the study, found the second one, believed to be a female skull.
"It was really well preserved with the teeth and everything," Cunningham said. "Finding one with teeth is pretty rare. It was so odd, but when they come out of the ground, you have a long way to go to actually see what you have because they're still covered in matrix. We were all kind of in awe of it. It had this long, skinny snout. It was quite a bit different. It took me years to get it prepped and ready. At the time, I was working full-time and I did that on my days off."
The new species were discovered in the Cooper Canyon formation in Garza County, Texas. However, finding Phytosaurs here is quite common. While the area is now arid and scrubby, in the Triassic era, it was a conifer forest that boasted an oxbow lake where the creatures hunted.
The findings of the researchers have been published in the journal Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
