Hammerhead Salamander "Diplocaulus" EXTINCT

Unknown hammerhead salamanders are reported in cryptozoology from time to time. In 1992, a Japanese artist made a small diplocaulus model which he photographed in a pan on a lawn. The photo looked quite realistic and was circulated in 2004 and 2005 on forums where many thought it was a real salamander. Diplocaulus lived from the late Carboniferous to the late Permian period (roughly 270 million years ago) I had seen the picture of it in the pan with water in a few diffrent videos and so I did some research and found out it was a fake picture and had been extinct for a long time. There are no other videos on youtube that explain this and that is why I made this video. The hammerhead salamander "Diplocaulus" is in fact extinct. [Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia] "Diplocaulus in popular culture" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplocaulus Info on a study done in 1980. http://www.jstor.org/pss/35462 When you get there it says "You are not currently authorized to access this article." Dont worry about that I accessed it just fine. Two major subclasses of extinct amphibians are found in the fossil record. They are the Labyrinthodontia and the Lepospondyli. The amphibians of the Labyrinthodontia, which lived during the late Devonian through Triassic periods (345 to 190 million years ago), include the most primitive amphibians represented by the genus Ichthyostega. They were fresh-water carnivorous animals, with tail fins, small scales, and a fishlike vertebral column. Their skulls had many bones, as did those of their presumed crossopterygian ancestor. The Labyrinthodontia, according to the U.S. paleontologist Alfred S. Romer, include three extinct orders: the Ichthyostegalia, the Temnospondyli, and the Anthracosauria. The Anthracosauria are thought to be the ancestors of reptiles and hence of modern birds and mammals. The Temnospondyli are thought by some scientists to be the ancestors of the modern frogs. The amphibians of the subclass Lepospondyli, which lived during the Mississippian through lower Permian periods (340 to 270 million years ago), include the extinct orders Nectridea, Aistopoda, and Microsauria. Members of the latter two orders were elongate. Some had limbs, some had reduced limbs, and some had no limbs. Many scientists suggest that the ancestors of modern salamanders and caecilians are among the lepospondyl. (Lepospondyli Classification) All Lepospondyls are most notably characterised by having simple, spool-shaped vertebra, which were not preformed as cartilage but rather grew as bony cylinders around the notochord. Usually also the upper portion of the vertebra, the neural arch, is fused to the centra (the main body of the vertebra) (Colbert 1969). No clear common ancestors are known, since each of the known clades are already highly specialised when they first appear in the fossil record. It is not known whether the Lepospondyls are an artificial (polyphyletic) group which independently evolved similar characteristics of the vertebra, or whether they descended from a single common ancestor. At one time it was thought that some Lepospondyls are related or perhaps ancestral to modern Urodela, although this view is no longer held. For a long time they were considered one of the three subclasses of amphibians (Romer 1966, Colbert 1969, Carroll 1988) More recently it has been suggested that the Lepospondyls may be related or ancestral to modern amphibians as well as to amniotes (reptiles etc) (Laurin 1996) , that they are an artificial grouping with some members related to both extinct and living amphibians (Batrachomorpha) but not amniotes (Benton 2000), or alternatively are a monophyletic group closely related to the ancestry of amniotes but not to recent amphibians (Benton 2004). Apart from the Nectridea, Lepospondyls are limited in distribution to Europe and North America (Carroll 1988).