Reptile Skull Is Only 2nd One Ever Found

When Paul Olsen saw part of a bone peeking out of the rock along a roadside in Cheshire, Conn., two years ago, he thought he had happened upon a dinosaur skull. Later he realized that he had discovered a prize far more rare: a three-inch-long, nearly complete skull from a reptile that lived 212 million years ago.

Olsen, a Columbia University professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, had happened upon a fossil from a creature for which scientists had only one other known specimen--and that one showed up 102 years ago in Elgin, Scotland. (In the creature’s time, what are now Scotland and Connecticut were connected because the continents were mushed together in the land mass that has been dubbed Pangea.)

Based on similarities between a galloping crocodilian that lives today in Australia and the new fossil, Olsen and colleague Hans-Dieter Sues of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto believe that the 20-inch-long creature resembled a crocodile in some respects. But the creature was a tiny land dweller that darted about on long, slender legs. “If we saw it walking around, I don’t think ‘crocodiles’ is the idea that would leap into our minds,” said Olsen, who presented the findings this month at a paleontology conference in Connecticut.

The find could deepen understanding of reptile evolution during the Triassic period, a time when dinosaurs had not yet assumed their dominant role. If crocodilians did include land animals that developed into semiaquatic creatures, their evolutionary course would resemble that of whales and other animals that made their way back to the seas.

Olsen said he and his colleagues have not settled upon a name for the creature, though Sues jokes about calling it “Ittybitadon.”