A Saltwater Amphibian: Gerrothorax maritimus
Meet Gerrothorax maritimus the newly named Triassic predator from China! Picture a giant salamander mixed with a Pac-Man frog. Now give it gills and armor. NOW stick it at the bottom of the ocean living like an angel shark. There may not be any modern marine amphibians, but it sure looks like there
10/26/20261 min read
Publication Info:
Transcript:
Lipin Diao, Ryosuke Motani, Da-yong Jiang, Jiaxu Hao & Shengyu Wang A fully marine stem amphibian from the Late Triassic of China, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-026-03209-9
Meet Gerrothorax maritimus, the newly named Triassic predator from China! Picture a giant salamander mixed with a Pac-Man frog. Now give it gills and armor. NOW stick it at the bottom of the ocean living like an angel shark. There may not be any modern marine amphibians, but it sure looks like there used to be!
Episode 364
Notes:
Sometimes new species drop that just sound too weird to be real. Picture a giant salamander and then mix it with a Pacman frog and give it gills and give it body armor pretty much everywhere. Then stick it at the bottom of the actual ocean acting like a carpet shark or an angel shark and you'll have the new prehistoric predator that was just named. And you heard me right, it's a marine amphibian. Meet Gerrothorax maritimus the newly named prehistoric predator that would have lived in China 237 million years ago in the Triassic. And this isn't one of those cases where paleontologists look at an animal and they're like, "Hey, it may have been possible for it to do this occasionally." This looks like a truly marine amphibian. First of all, it was found in a location that during the Triassic would have been hundreds of miles from any actual land. Second, there were two nearly complete skeletons discovered and when animals tend to bloat and float, meaning the the cases where animals die then they float out to sea and then they eventually sink to the bottom and get preserved thanks to decomposition and scavengers, it's really rare for them to end up complete, never mind twice. And third, just to be sure, researchers conducted geochemical analyses on the fossils and determined that the strontium isotopes were consistent with what you would have seen in Triassic oceans, meaning that this bizarre giant armored frog salamander thing was living at the bottom of Triassic oceans. As usual, if you want more information, here's the source.