World's Oldest Marine Vegetarian Reptile Has a Hammerhead Mouth

A strange-looking hammerhead creature, roughly the size of a crocodile, could be the world's oldest marine vegetarian reptile.

Discovered in China two years ago, the uncovered fossil is estimated to have been 242 million years old. Although the head is poorly preserved, the remains somehow suggest that it has a hammerhead-shaped jaw which the reptilian creature used to feed on plants underwater.

"It's a very strange animal. It's got a hammerhead, which is unique, it's the first time we've seen a reptile like this," said Olivier Rieppel, from The Field Museum in Chicago as quoted by Science Daily.

The creature is named Atopodentatus unicus which means 'unique strangely toothed' in Latin. While Chinese paleontologists initially assumed that the hammerhead shape may have been its snout, a paper published in the journal Science Advances suggest that the hammerhead shape may have been the reptile's face altogether, New York Times reported.

The researchers figured out the whole puzzle after finding two new related fossils with better preserved heads than the first specimen they worked on.

The team also made of playdough or children clay as well as toothpicks to reconstruct the head, the jaws and the teeth. By doing so, they came to the conclusion that reptile was by all means, a herbivore.

By studying its anatomical functions, the creature may have used its teeth for scraping algae and then sucking it up to its mouth like a vacuum cleaning. The researchers went on to say that the crocodile-sized reptile would have used its tiny needle-like teeth for trapping plants and filtering water as a whale would do with baleen.

Despite clearing the haze regarding its anatomy, the scientists still find the discovery surprising.

"The existence of specialized animals like Atopodentatus unicus shows us that life recovered and diversified more quickly than previously thought," said Rieppel as mentioned in Times of India report.

The latest paleontological find also provided the scientific community a very good example of plant-eating marine reptilian creature. With the discovery of Atopodentatus, scientists are able to recreate a picture of life on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago.