In a dried up lake in Portugal, scientists have discovered the fossil of a long-extinct "super salamander" that was likely a terror to its peers.
According to BBC News, the amphibian would have lived 220 million years ago. Though it was identified as a salamander, its massive size and long, toothy snout makes it appear more like a crocodile than anything else.
The researchers' study on the salamander is published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
"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," study lead author Steve Brusatte, of the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences, said in a press release. "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."
Metoposaurus algarvensis would have been one of the larger predators of its time, as dinosaurs and mammals had not yet reached their peak, Brusatte told BBC News.
"These big amphibians were some of the main predators and denizens of that world. So our earliest ancestors and the earliest dinosaurs would have had to deal with these guys in their formative years," he said. "Like people down in Louisiana or Florida today: 'Stay away from the water or the crocs might get you!' I think that's what it would have been like with the earliest dinosaurs.
"In a way it was the death of these things that allowed the dinosaurs and mammals to take over."
