An international group of scientists has almost completely described for the first time a strange animal that resembles a dragon from Chinese mythology – an archosauromorph that lived in China during the Triassic period.

Dinocephalosaurus orientalis It is a basal (i.e., other previously diverged groups of the family) archosauromorph species known from fossils in China. These magnificent animals lived in shallow seas during the Middle Triassic period (247.2 million to 237 million years ago) and probably fed on fish and cephalopods.

There is an opinion that dinocephalosaurs were ambush predators and literally caught fish in muddy water. Perhaps for this they needed a surprisingly long neck – it had to be up to 1.7 meters! While hunting, the animal most likely bent its neck and then suddenly straightened it and attacked the victim. Dinocephalosaurs expanded their necks, pushing aside special ribs growing on the cervical vertebrae to dampen the shock wave that could alert the latter to danger. Because of its long neck, the archosauromorph was called the “Chinese dragon” because it really resembles creatures from the mythology of the Celestial Empire.

Scientists first described the animal’s skull and three cervical vertebrae in 2003, found in the Guanling Formation in southwestern China’s Guizhou Province. Since then, other remains of these creatures have been discovered, and today they are kept at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences at the Zhejiang Natural History Museum. And recently paleontologists have discovered additional specimens.

Therefore, scientists from the above-mentioned Zhejiang Museum, the Natural History Museum (USA), the national museums of Scotland, the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History (Germany), called “Chinese Dragon”. Paleontologists’ research has been published Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in Earth and Environmental Science.

It turns out that Dinocephalosaurus did indeed have an extraordinarily long neck with 32 individual vertebrae. According to scientists, this is related to tanistrophic dinocephalosaurs (i.e. Tanystropheus Hydroides ) is a genus of archosauromorphs, extinct reptiles from the same lineage that lived in both Europe and China. Both reptiles had the same size (about six meters long), long necks and sharp teeth. But still Dinocephalosaurus jumped Tanystrophe by its neck! The number of vertebrae in both the neck and spine of the first person exceeded that of the second person.

Scientists also discovered that dinocephalosaurus had a long tail. And the animal most likely fed on fish and always lived in water, never coming to land. There the dinocephalosaurs gave birth to young and did not lay viable eggs.