No amphibian alive today can survive the ocean's salt. But fossils described on October 26, 2026 reveal Gerrothorax maritimus, a flat, bony-plated predator that stalked the Triassic seafloor 237 million years ago.
The October 26, 2026 report on Gerrothorax maritimus: two near-complete skeletons from a 237-million-year-old sea, with seawater chemistry locked in their bones.
Popular Science on how a UC Davis-led team argues this three-foot amphibian lived its whole life offshore, possibly armored against hungry ichthyosaurs.
Meet the genus: a wide, flattened amphibian that kept its external gills into adulthood and snapped its whole head upward to ambush prey.
The 210-million-year dynasty of armored, crocodile-sized amphibians that Gerrothorax belonged to, from the Carboniferous swamps into the Triassic.
Of 8,000 living amphibians, this is the rare one that tolerates salt water, and it still can't do what Gerrothorax did. Why the ocean is a wall for amphibians.
The dolphin-shaped predators that already ruled the Triassic ocean, and may be exactly why Gerrothorax grew its slab of bony armor.
A deep dive into the strange, enormous amphibians of deep time, the lineage that produced a creature bold enough to live in the sea.