Salamanders as Big as Cars: A Selection from Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs (2019)

“I had never seen so many fossils concentrated together in one area. It was a mass graveyard. Countless skeletons of amphibians called Metoposaurus—supersize versions of today’s salamanders that were the size of a small car—were jumbled together in a chaotic mess. There must have been hundreds of them.

Some 230 million years ago, a flock of these slimy, ugly monsters suddenly died when the lake they were living in dried up, collateral damage of the capricious Pangean climate. Giant amphibians like Metoposaurus were leading actors in the story of Triassic Pangea. They prowled the shores of rivers and lakes over much of the supercontinent, particularly the subtropical arid regions and midlatitude humid belts.

If you were a frail little primitive dinosaur like Eoraptor, you would want to avoid the shorelines at all costs. It was enemy territory. Metoposaurus was there waiting, lurking in the shallows, ready to ambush anything that ventured too close to the water. Its head was the size of a coffee table, and its jaws were studded with hundreds of piercing teeth. Its big, broad, almost flat upper and lower jaws were hinged together at the back and could snap shut like a toilet seat to gobble up whatever it wanted. It would only take a few bites to finish off a delicious dinosaur supper.

Salamanders bigger than humans seem like a mad hallucination. As bizarre as they were, though, Metoposaurus and its kin were not aliens. These terrifying predators were the ancestors of today’s frogs, toads, newts, and salamanders.”—Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World (2019)