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Middle Triassic marine Arctobatrachus: a new giant (2m) plagiosaur from Svalbard

Sunday, October 25, 2026 9:43

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Schoch et al., 2026 reported,
“With its huge size and enlarged gape, A. [Arctobatrachus] urdensis represents the ﬁrst plagiosaurid top predator known so far, and its occurrence in marine deposits is consistent with the euryhaline habits of some other taxa in the clade.”

Figure 1. Arctobatrachus skeleton from Schoch et al 2026. Yes, the limbs are not preserved.

This is a great, if somewhat degraded, specimen.
The only problem is the published cladogram, which excludes pertinent taxa recovered by the large reptile tree (LRT, 2340 taxa, subset Fig 2) where plagiosaurs are closer to fish than all other tetrapod clades, but one.

The authors derived plagiosaurs from the derived tetrapod, Dendrepeton.

Figure 2. Subset of the LRT focusing on basal tetrapods (aka amphibians).

Schoch et al wrote:
“Plagiosaurids form a disparate and highly aberrant clade of Triassic temnospondyls (Hellrung 2003; Jenkins et al. 2008).

In the LRT (Fig 2) plagiosaurs are basal tetrapods, not temnospondyls. As basal tetrapods basal plagiosaurs cannot, by definition, be ‘highly aberrant’ – but derived plagiosaurs can get strange = flat, wide and adapted to raise the skull, not drop the mandible, when feeding.

“They are characterized by very wide parabolic skulls and a ﬂattened body that permitted them to live at the bottom of water bodies. Plagiosaurids had well-ossiﬁed hyobranchial skeletons and a broad mouth equipped with numerous tiny teeth, and are likely to have lived as akinetic suction feeders (Witzmann and Schoch 2013).”

That ‘well-ossified hyobranchial skeleton’ = gill arches = primitive trait close to fish.

References
Schoch RR et al (3 co-authors) 2026. “A giant plagiosaurid temnospondyl from Bjørnøya (Svalbard, Norway) and the origin of the plagiosaurid body plan”. Papers in Palaeontology. 12 (4) e70115.

wiki/Arctobatrachus

Source: https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2026/10/25/middle-triassic-marine-arctobatrachus-a-new-giant-2m-plagiosaur-from-svalbard/

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