Co-author Ben Otoo with a life-size illustration of Whatcheeria. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Ben Otoo. |
The Field Museum in Chicago is home to the best, most-complete fossils of a prehistoric superpredator-- but one that lived hundreds of millions of years before SUE the T. rex. Whatcheeria was a six-foot-long lake-dwelling creature with a salamander-like body and a long, narrow head; its fossils were discovered in a limestone quarry near the town of What Cheer, Iowa. There are around 350 Whatcheeria specimens, ranging from single bones to complete skeletons, that have been unearthed, and every last one of them resides in the Field Museum’s collections. In a new study in Communications Biology, these specimens helped reveal how Whatcheeria grew big enough to menace its fishy prey: instead of growing “slow and steady” the way that many modern reptiles and amphibians do, it grew rapidly in its youth.
“If you saw Whatcheeria in life, it would probably look like a big crocodile-shaped salamander, with a narrow head and lots of teeth,” says Ben Otoo, a co-author of the study and a PhD student at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum. “If it really curled up, probably to an uncomfortable extent, it could fit in your bathtub, but neither you nor it would want it to be there.”