Big Gulp? Neck ribs may have given aquatic beast unique feeding style
By Sid Perkins
The fossilized neck bones of a 230-million-year-old sea creature have features suggesting that the animal’s snakelike throat could flare open and create suction that would pull in prey. Such a feeding strategy has never before been proposed for an ancient aquatic reptile.
Paleontologists working in southern China recently unearthed the partial remains of Dinocephalosaurus orientalis, which translates as “terrible-headed lizard from the Orient.” The trunk of the creature’s body was less than 1 meter long, but its neck had 25 vertebrae and measured 1.7 m, says Olivier Rieppel, a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago. Like other members of the reptile group called protorosaurs, Dinocephalosaurus had thin bones, or cervical ribs, attached to and extending alongside its neck vertebrae.