Paleontologists Hugo Campos and Octávio Mateus, told Lusa News Agency that they found the placodont “ribs and a Shell” in 2016, but have only now disclosed the discovery by publishing a study in the catalogue for an exhibition “Loulé: Territories. Memories. Identities”, on display at the National Archeology Museum.
“Placodonts are a group of marine reptiles that had not been identified in Portugal, but are known in other parts of the world”, said Octávio Mateus, who supervised Hugo Campos’ paleontology Master’s thesis about Triassic vertebrates in the Algarve.
The study “Loulé more than 220 million years ago: the fossil vertebrates of the Algarve in the Triassic”, published now, details that the placodonts lived in the sea during the Triassic period between 250 million and 200 million years ago. Feeding on molluscs, they had boney plates that made them look a bit like turtles. A large number of these boney plates, which the scientists call ‘osteode-rms’, were found around Loulé and Silves in the Algarve in 2016 and 2017.
The researchers believe that these placodonts were of the ‘Henodus’ type because of the long, flat, hexagonal shape and without ornamentation of the shell and lacking teeth.
The village of Penina, near Loulé, has what is considered to be the main deposit from the upper Triassic in Portugal and is one of the most important sites for vertebrate paleontology in the country.
The deposit has turned up ten ‘Metoposaurus algarvensis’ (an amphibian similar to a salamander), bivalves and fish scales, phytosaurs (similar to crocodiles) and placodonts, but there may be as many as 20 animals.
The Triassic period, the first period of the Mezoic era, was a period in history when the continents were still all joined together in a super-continent (Pangeia) and when the dinosaurs and other animals appeared and spread around the world.