Cow-Sized, Lizard-Like Bumpy Creature Once Roamed Desert Of Pangea: Strange Knobby-Headed Reptile Sheds Light On Era 50 Million Years Before Dinosaurs

A lumpy, cow-sized creature covered with bumps once roamed the desert. A new study of fossils found that the lizard-like creature, called Bunostegos akokanensis, once lived in the desert on the supercontinent Pangea.

The ancient, cow-sized reptile has a face that looks like it's melting. The lizard-like critter is from a group called pareiasaurs. They are large herbivorous reptiles that lived from 266 million to 252 million years ago-fifty million years before the dinosaurs.

It's a rare beast, indeed.

The knobby skull fossils of the pareiasaurs were discovered in what is now Niger. The bony knobs were probably once horns covered with skin, similar to the horns of modern giraffes.

The new evidence also means that Earth may have been much more diverse than scientists previously thought thought.

Today, the area where the fossils were found is the Sahara Desert. It was still a desert 260 million years ago, but it was on Pangea. However, the desert seems to have been more habitable than scientists previously thought.

"We suspect there was an oasis type area that could support life," said Linda Tsuji, a researcher in the remarkable new study.

The bumpy skulls of the pareiasaur gave them the name Bunostegos, which means "knobby roof," or skull.

"Each species of pareiasaur has bumps in the same place, but the shape and degree of the bumps is different," Tsuji said. The scientists theorize that they helped pareiasaurs of the same species recognize each other.

Some other types of pareiasaur had knobs, but none as large as in the Bunostegos.

Several types of species on Pangea were broadly dispersed across a wide area, but the Bunostegos doesn't seem to have been. Tsuji and her colleagues found evidence that seems to indicate the Bunostegos was part of a group of animals that became isolated in an enormous desert in the center of Pangea. Due to the isolation, "there was not much interchange into or out of that area," a researcher said.