Drepanosaurids

Drepanosaurids were very strange, dinosaur-like reptiles that lived during the Late Triassic Period. While these reptiles look like lizards, they are not closely related.

Drepanosaurids were so different from most other animals that their strange combination of features–a claw on the end of their tail like a scorpion, a beak-like mouth on a bird-like head, huge claws on their index fingers, fused backbones, and many more–make it very difficult to determine what they even looked like, let alone how they lived.

These drepanosaurids belong to a new genus and species that a team of paleontologists are studying and will name. They were discovered at the Saints & Sinners Quarry, like many of the other fossils that we are also studying.