A team of paleontologists from Yale University, Smithsonian Institution and Johns Hopkins University has discovered a new species of reptile that lived 200 million years ago during the Triassic period, in what is now Connecticut in the United States.
An artist’s rendering of Colobops noviportensis. Image credit: Michael Hanson.
Dubbed Colobops noviportensis, the ancient reptile had exceptionally large jaw muscles — setting it apart from other reptiles at the time.
“Colobops noviportensis would have been a diminutive but plucky little beast, part of a little-known menagerie of small animals that lived among the first dinosaurs,” said Dr. Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, from Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University.
“Its tiny frame hid some big secrets. Despite its lizard-like aspect, it is in fact an early branch-off of the lineage leading to dinosaurs and birds. Also, its little jaws could bite harder than anything else its size. Perhaps that big bite allowed it to feed on tough, armored prey impervious to weaker mouths.”
Dr. Bhullar and colleagues analyzed a very small partial skull (total length = 2.5 cm) of Colobops noviportensis from the Upper Triassic New Haven Arkose of Connecticut.
“The skull was initially discovered during roadwork in 1965. It has been part of the collections of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History for decades,” said Dr. Adam Pritchard, from the Smithsonian Institution.
“In the 1990s, the skull was subject to initial study in which it was identified as a cousin of a modern lizard-like reptile called a tuatara.”
“Our study ups the ante again, using advanced CT scanning and 3D modeling to reveal all kinds of new features of the skull. The features are very distinctive, allowing us to establish a new species.”
The team did a 3D reconstruction of Colobops noviportensis’s skull and discovered that it showed specialization in the jaw that was unprecedented in any other known small tetrapod, juvenile or adult.
“Comparisons with modern reptile dissections showed that it had incredibly well-developed jaw muscles for its size, suggesting an exceptional bite, even compared to the diversity of modern reptiles,” Dr. Pritchard said.
“It’s a great illustration of the critical importance of fossils big and small for understanding the diversity of organisms.”
The discovery, reported in the journal Nature Communications, means modern vertebrates originated in a world that was already populated by small and large-bodied physical extremes, in terms of how animals physically adapted to their environment.
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Adam C. Pritchard et al. 2018. A tiny Triassic saurian from Connecticut and the early evolution of the diapsid feeding apparatus. Nature Communications 9, article number: 1213; doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-03508-1
