Bones of a hippo-like monster found in Vyatka - he lived 265 million years ago (3 photos)

On the right bank of the Vyatka River near the town of Kotelnich tourist stumbled upon the bones of an ancient parareptile that roamed these edges at the end of the Permian period. The amazing monster resembled in part hippo, and partly a giant lizard.





The girl walked around the "cemetery of dinosaurs" - Kotelnichesky the location of the pareiasaurs. She spoke about her find. amateur paleontologists, and they already brought a researcher to the place Vyatka Paleontological Museum. The scientist confirmed - the bones belong to Scutosaurus, a parareptile from the family Pareiasauridae.



Photo: Natalia Brodyagina

“Now they will definitely take us with them to the excavations and we will witnesses of the appearance from the depths of the layers of clay of a creature that lived 265 million years ago. It’s not sickly like that, in general, ”Natalya said on social networks. Lozhkin, which preserved the bones before the researchers arrived. She also published several photos from the future excavation site.

At the end of the Permian period, the plain was covered by a vast river system, where later they began to find fossils with remains Scutosaurus karpinskii (Scutosaurus karpinskii). At the beginning of the 20th century scutosaurs belonged to the genus of pareiasaurs (Pareiasaurus), but later they assigned to a separate genus. Scutosaurs flourished in the Permian and almost completely disappeared in the middle Triassic, shortly before the appearance dinosaurs. According to the calculations of paleontologists, the length of these animals could reach 2-4 m, weight - 700 kg.



To date, it is not clear exactly what kind of lifestyle they led. pareiasaurs, but there are two assumptions. The first hypothesis is that the lizards were land and fed on succulent roots dug out of the ground. According to the second version, they led an aquatic lifestyle and, according to their habits, were close to modern hippos. It is even possible that scutosaurs in general could not walk - Soviet paleontologists assumed that animals swam, but not like hippos, but rather like sea cows.

What the ancient monster ate is also impossible to say yet. for sure. The teeth of scutosaurs look like petals with small teeth - similar ones were found in some dinosaurs, and also in modern iguanas. Perhaps scutosaurs sifted algae with their teeth, collecting way of larvae, worms or small crustaceans.