Tupilakosaurus
Tupilakosaurus is an extinct genus of dvinosaurian temnospondyl within the family Tupilakosauridae.

Daeng Dino · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- TupilakosauridaePBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Temnospondyli
- Life habit
- amphibiousPBDB, for Temnospondyli
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Temnospondyli
- Environment
- brackish,freshwater,terrestrialPBDB, for Tetrapoda
Time the record covers
At most 1.2 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 251.902 Mya and 250.8 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
16 occurrences of Tupilakosaurus on record, most of them in the Early Triassic. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
16 occurrences- Early Triassic100%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
4 formations
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The named rock units Tupilakosaurus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Tupilakosaurus and its relatives
Early TriassicWhere Tupilakosaurus and its relatives were recorded in the Early Triassic.
Found in the same rock
23 taxa- Temnospondyli3 sites
- Axitectum vjushkovi1 site
- Batrachomorpha1 site
- Cosgriffiinae indet.1 site
- Crocopoda1 site
- Darwinula1 site
- Gerdalia1 site
- Lonchorhynchidae indet.1 site
- Lydekkerinidae1 site
- Mastodonsauridae1 site
- Microcnemus1 site
- Phaanthosaurus1 site
- Phaanthosaurus ignatjevi1 site
- Phaanthosaurus simus1 site
- Procolophonidae1 site
- Qantas1 site
- Reptilia1 site
- Samarabatrachus bjerringi1 site
- Selenocara rossica1 site
- Syrtosuchus samarensis1 site
- Trematotegmen otschevi1 site
- Vetlugospermum rombicum1 site
- Vonhuenia friedrichi1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 16 sites for Tupilakosaurus, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
4 references- Tetrapod localities from the Triassic of the SE of European Russia12
- Tupilakosaurus helimani n. g. et n. sp. An interesting batrachomorph from the Triassic of East Greenland2
- New tempospondyl amphibians from the basal Triassic of the Obshchii Syrt Highland, Eastern Europe1
- [Recent data on Tupilakosaurus]. In Russian1
Each of the 16 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Tupilakosaurus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Daeng Dino
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Tupilakosaurus was found in Smithsonian Open Access and Sketchfab.
MorphoSource was not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itTupilakosauridae through timeFormations of the Early TriassicThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Nielsen 1954