Two fossils of a type of primitive amphibian from a group called temnospondyls were found in what is now Guizhou province in China ' which would have been a salty sea during the Late Triassic period. The researchers have provisionally named the species Gerrothorax maritimus. The 74-centimetre-long creatures had flattened bodies and were almost completely covered in body armour. There are more than 8,000 modern amphibian species, but none of them lives exclusively in a marine environment. 'This is potentially a revolutionary discovery,' says Steve Brusatte, a palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. 'If this Triassic amphibian, Gerrothorax, really was fully marine, then it is a game-changer.' Amphibians have varying levels of salt tolerance, says Ryosuke Motani, a palaeobiologist at the University of California, Davis, and a co-author of the study. But even salt-tolerant animals need to recover from excess salt in one way or another, he explains....
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