Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

Jurassic Amphibians in Australia

Several Australian deposits have produced temnospondyl  amphibians. A mandible fragment from the Marburg Formation on the banks of the Brisbane River, southeast Queensland, was named Austropelor wadleyi in 1941. A feature of this specimen is the arrangement of tooth sockets which decrease in size from the back to the front of the jaw. Such a feature is characteristic of brachyopoids, a group of temnospondyls from the Triassic to the Cretaceous of central Asia, India, South America, South Africa, and Australia. The Westgrove Ironstone Member, Evergreen Formation in southeastern Queensland, produced another amphibian, Siderops Kehli, of which a skeleton has been found that is almost complete, only missing parts of the limbs and tail. At 2.5 m long this was a large crocodile-like aquatic temnospondyl, a derived member of the Chigutisauridae (a brachyopoid family). Its head was almost 650 mm wide with upward facing orbits and along the side of the jaw were large lance-shaped teeth. Kear & Hamilton-Bruce suggest it probably lived in freshwater rivers and lakes, the same habitat occupied by freshwater plesiosaurs.

Sources & Further reading

1. Kear, B.P. & Hamilton-Bruce, R.J., 2011, Dinosaurs in Australia, Mesozoic life from the southern continent, CSIRO Publishing.