According to the BBC, hundreds of the creatures probably died when the lake dried up, leaving a huge jumble of bones which is now being excavated near Loulé in the Algarve.
The so-called ‘super salamander’ is thought to be a member of the crocodile-like amphibian species and looked like a giant salamander. The creatures were distant relatives of the salamanders of today but much bigger and fiercer.
Although related to modern salamanders, the two-metre beast probably lived more like a crocodile, snapping up fish and scrapping with rivals on the shore. The find is reported in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology, and has been given the name Metoposaurus algarvensis after the region it was found in.
Speaking to the BBC, Dr Steve Brusatte, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, said: “It was as long as a small car.”
He said: “It had hundreds of sharp teeth in its big, flat head which kind of looks like a toilet seat when the jaws snap shut.”
“It was the type of fierce predator that the very first dinosaurs had to put up with if they strayed too close to the water, long before the glory days of T-Rex and Brachiosaurus,” he added.
The new species was discovered in a large bed of bones in southern Portugal.
It’s thought several hundred of the creatures may have died when the lake they lived in dried up.
Only a small part of the site, around four square metres at the time of going to press, has been excavated so far and the team of palaeontologists are still looking for more new findings.
Speaking to Lusa News Agency, Portuguese palaeontologist Octávio Mateus, who was also involved in the discovery, explained that the newly-found species of salamander would have co-existed with the very first dinosaurs and was wiped out during a mass extinction that occurred 201 million years ago.
“There were various en-mass extinctions and that one coincides with the separating of the continents. It was possibly due to that situation, to volcanic activity, and to climate change”, he elaborated.
According to scientists it was around that time, 201 million years ago, that the supercontinent Pangaea, which was made up of all continents, started to divide, giving shape to the planet’s current layout.
Octávio Mateus told Lusa that so far two skulls “in very good condition” have been discovered along with remains that the specialists identified as belonging to nine of the
creatures.
Besides Octávio Mateus, who is from Lisbon’s Nova University’s Faculty for Sciences and Technology, other investigators including researchers from the universities of Edinburgh and Birmingham and from Paris’s Natural History Museum are taking part in the dig.