Dino card No. 0724 of 2,027

Glyphoderma

Name means: “sculptured skin”1

Ate: FishSea reptilesMiddle TriassicNot technically a dinosaur

Glyphoderma was a strange, armored reptile that swam in the seas of China during the Middle Triassic. It had a hard shell made of hundreds of bony plates, like a turtle, but it was actually a placodont, a cousin of the long-necked plesiosaurs.1

Fun fact: this sea reptile swam while dinosaurs walked on land. Everyone calls them dinos, but they were a different branch of reptiles.

Lived

241 to 237 million years ago3

Middle Triassic

Fossils found in

Fuyuan, Yunnan Province, China3 1

Food

Fish1

Length

0.873 m1

holotype specimen

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How long was it?

as long as 1.5 house cats nose to tailas long as 5 bananas end to end

How big was Glyphoderma compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Glyphoderma's shell was made of more than 400 separate bony plates, called osteoderms, that fit together like a puzzle.1

It had three large, cone-shaped bumps fused to the back of its skull, which no other placodont had.1 2

Glyphoderma is the only known placodont from the Ladinian age of the Middle Triassic in its family, Placochelyidae.2

Its name means 'sculptured skin' because of the deep grooves and ridges on its shell plates.1

The first fossil of Glyphoderma was found in a thick block of limestone, so scientists cannot see its belly very well.1

Glyphoderma had a very strong skull because most of its skull bones were fused together.1

AI-made picture of Glyphoderma — An AI-made picture of how Glyphoderma might have looked, made by a computer from what scientists know. It is a guess: the real animal may have looked different, and nobody knows its true colours.

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For dino experts

Scientific name: Glyphoderma
Named by: Zhao et al. 20083
Group: Sea reptiles
Family / clade: Placochelyidae3
Classification: Placodontia > Sauropterygia3
Age of the rocks: 241 to 237 million years (Ladinian)3
Rock formations: Falang3
Countries: China3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Glyphoderma was named in 2008 by Zhao Lijun and colleagues based on a nearly complete skeleton found in Fuyuan, Yunnan, China. The species name G. kangi honors Mr. Kang Ximin.3 1
Still debated: Scientists are still debating exactly how Glyphoderma swam and moved, because its flattened body and heavy shell were very different from other marine reptiles.1

Where the facts come from

Glyphoderma (en.wikipedia.org)
A NEW ARMORED PLACODONT FROM THE MIDDLE TRIASSIC OF YUNNAN PROVINCE, SOUTHWESTERN CHINA (vertpala.ac.cn)
Glyphoderma in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.

Every fact on this page has a number that points to its source. If we got something wrong, sorry, we are dino fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.

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