A BIZARRE ancient sea creature with a twisted jaw and sideways-facing teeth has been uncovered.
The creature’s mouth was so strange that experts initially thought it must have had a deformation.
It wasn’t until another eight were found with the same unusual jawbone that the team realised it was as nature intended.
The species has been named Tanyka amnicola and would have lived around what is now Brazil some 275million years ago.
It’s part of a much larger group of animals called tetrapods.
Tetrapods are four-legged animals with backbones – modern tetrapods include reptiles, birds, mammals, and amphibians.
Scientists from the Field Museum say the “really weird” jaw meant the sea beast had to eat an entirely different way to what you might expect.
Their lower jaw was twisted, so that instead of facing up, the teeth pointed out to the sides.
And the area of its jawbone that, in us, faces the tongue, instead faces up towards the roof of the mouth in Tanykas.
It’s covered in a number of smaller teeth called denticles, which form a grinding surface, kind of similar a cheese grater.
So instead of chewing food they had to grind it against their teeth – and it was among the first of their kind to do this.
“Tanyka is from an ancient lineage that we didn’t know survived to this time, and it’s also just a really strange animal,” explained Jason Pardo from the Field Museum in Chicago who led the research.
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“The jaw has this weird twist that drove us crazy trying to figure it out.
“We were scratching our heads over this for years, wondering if it was some kind of deformation.
“‘But at this point, we’ve got nine jaws from this animal, and they all have this twist, including the really, really well-preserved ones.
“So it’s not a deformation, it’s just the way the animal was made.”
Experts say a lot about the creature remains a mystery.
The biggest of them is what the rest of its body may have looked like, as fossils of the jaw are all they’ve found so far.
But they estimate that it could be up to three feet long and probably lived in lakes.
“We can say, by comparison with close relatives, that Tanyka might have looked kind of like a salamander with a slightly longer snout,” Pardo continued.
