Imagine this: you’re a scientist excavating near the Amazon rainforest, and you pull your jaw out of the wrong-looking soil and think you’ve broken through.
Then you find another one. Same weird twist. And then another. And another one. Nine in total, each with the same confusing condition.
That’s exactly what happened to a team of researchers who recently identified one of the strangest ancient creatures ever discovered – and are rewriting the textbooks in the process.
An animal? Tanyka amnicola, which roughly translates to “jaws that live near the river.”
It lived about 275 million years ago, and its discovery made scientists rethink the most certain ideas about when certain ancient creatures disappeared from the earth.
Tanyka Amnicola Is A New Species Starting With A Single ‘Weird’ Litter
How Tanyka came about is a story worth telling. Researchers found one twisted jaw during excavations in Brazil.
Their first impression? Something must have gone wrong. Perhaps the fossil was crushed during 275 million years underground. They also thought it was a fish, not a land animal.
“At first, we wondered if these could be the remains of a fish,” said the author Martha Richter you remember, according to the Natural History Museum. “It was only once the remains were properly processed in the lab that Tanyka’s true nature was clearly revealed to us.”
Then the team continued to dig and found eight more jaws with that lump. One oddly shaped jaw could be a fluke. Nine? That’s the pattern.
“Really weird animal, and the weird twist in the jaw drove us crazy trying to figure it out. But nine jaws we’ve found have this twist, including one that’s really well preserved, so it’s not decay. It’s just the way this animal was,” lead author Jason Pardo added.
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The repeated structure confirmed that the twisted jaw was a natural anatomical feature. And after comparing its features to known species spanning hundreds of millions of years, the team realized they had something unexpected on their hands.
“By comparing its natural characteristics with those of known species over hundreds of millions of years, we found that this animal was actually an ancient tetrapod,” added Richter.
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
What Made Tanyka Amnicola’s Jaw So Different?
Most tetrapods (a group of four-legged animals) have opposite upper and lower jaw teeth. This allows animals to slice, dice, and digest food. You can see the setup on everything from a house cat to an alligator.
Tanyka’s mouth let out the whole playbook.
Its lower jaw was twisted outwards. Some of the teeth were facing outwards and to the sides rather than inwards towards the opposite jaw.
And inside the jaw were small grinding teeth called denticles. Researchers believe that the denticles in the upper and lower jaws may have been rubbed together to grind food – almost like a built-in mortar and pestle.
Vitor Silva, Field Museum
If you could run your tongue over the teeth in the lower jaw, you could feel the tops of the teeth pointing up at the roof of your mouth.
In Tanyka, the twisted lower jaw meant that the teeth were pointed to the sides. The part of the jaw that normally faces the tongue is facing upwards.
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This unusual setup suggests a possible diet of hardy plants and small hard-shelled invertebrates, which would make Tanyka either omnivorous or herbivorous. That’s a departure from most of its carnivorous relatives.
The researchers described the species as belonging to a more experimental stage in early animal evolution, when nature was still experimenting with different designs for how the mouth might work.
Only the remains of the jaw have been definitively linked to the species, so scientists are not sure of its full shape. They believe it resembles a salamander-like animal with a long nose. Other fossils nearby may be of the same species, but that has not been confirmed.
Think of Tanyka Amnicola as a Platypus from 275 million years ago
The researchers themselves offered an analogy that made Tanyka’s place in the world click: think of a platypus.
That strange, swallow-tailed, egg-laying mammal looks like it belongs in an earlier chapter of evolution, but it still lives on today alongside modern creatures.
Tanyka had the same vibe. It was part of a group called stem tetrapods – the first relatives of modern four-legged animals that eventually gave rise to the ancestors of amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.
But most tetrapods became extinct long before Tanyka lived.
“Tanyka is similar to the platypus, in the sense that it was a member of the stem tetrapod lineage that survived even after the emergence of newer, modern tetrapods,” Pardo said. “It was a living relic of its time.”
Tanyka lived during the First Permian Period, when the world’s land mass was merged with the supercontinent Pangaea. The climate in which these fossils were found was probably hot and dry at certain times of the year.
Scientists have long believed that stem tetrapods largely disappeared after a major natural event called the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse. That event caused the destruction of tropical forests and wiped out the humid environment that many early tetrapods depended on.
Creatures like Tanyka must have left long before they appeared. Yet there it was, grinding food with its twisted jaw, millions of years later than expected.
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One possible explanation: species in the southern part of Pangea may have experienced different climates than those in the north. Those conditions may have allowed them to survive after the extinction of the northern inhabitants.
The fossil record near the Amazon, and in fossil sites around the world, may hold many creatures waiting to be discovered that defy what we think we know.
And it all started with one twisted jaw that you can’t explain.
