Scientists reveal 240-million-year-old ‘dragon’ fossil

Newly discovered fossils have allowed scientists to fully uncover a 240-million-year-old “dragon” for the first time in history, the National Museums of Scotland (NMS) said in a statement on Friday.

The five-meter-long reptile from the Triassic period in China was first identified in 2003, but after studying five new specimens over ten years, scientists were able to image the entire creature, which they named Dinocephalosaurus orientalis, CNN reports.

One fully articulated fossil, the latest to be discovered, was a “beautiful complete specimen from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail,” Dr. Nick Fraser, curator of national science at the National Museum of Scotland and one of the researchers, told CNN.

“It is curved in a figure eight and is very reminiscent of a Chinese dragon,” says Dr. Fraser.

This prehistoric fossil has helped shed light on this mysterious creature, and an international team of researchers from Scotland, Germany, the US and China have published their findings in the journal Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Professor Li Chun from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing was the first to discover the fossils back in 2003. According to his colleague Fraser, he was visiting a small village in Guizhou province in southern China when he noticed a small vertebrae in a block of limestone.

Local farmers then took Chun to a pig pen where there were other pieces of the same type of rock, and he began finding bone fragments and putting them together to discover this new species, Nick Fraser added.

Now new fossils indicate the creature had 32 vertebrae, creating an extremely long neck that likely helped it catch fish, although scientists are still unsure of its exact function.

“I’m still puzzled by the function of the long neck,” admits Dr. Fraser. “The only thing I can think of is that they fed in waters that had rocks and possibly crevices. And they used their long necks to explore some of these crevices and maybe get prey that way.”

A fish was still preserved in the stomach region of one fossil, indicating that the reptile was well adapted to the marine environment, and its finned limbs support this hypothesis, the researchers said in the paper.

They added that the long neck of the dinocephalosaur was reminiscent of another ancient and equally mysterious marine reptile, Tanystropheus hydroides.

“As paleontologists, we use modern analogs to understand life in the past. There is no modern analogue for Dinocephalosaurus and Tanystropheus,” Fraser said, adding that researchers can compare creatures such as ichthyosaurs to their modern counterparts such as tuna and dolphins.

So we still have some difficulty, as we did with many Triassic animals, because it really is a strange and wonderful world of all sorts of weird animals doing things that animals today don’t seem to do.”