A study published in the Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh journal has revealed about the discovery of two skulls of a new species of phytosaurs that have been unearthed from West Texas.

Though the skull was unearthed in 2001, it has however, now that their details have been verified. It has now been unveiled that they belong to an earlier unknown species of phytosaur. The new species is known as Machaeroprosopus lottorum as they were found on the farm of the Lott family in Texas.

Doug Cunningham, a co-author of the study from the Museum of Texas Tech University, said that it took him a long time to study the two-foot-long snouts of the skull. Scientists have estimated that one of them would be a male and another would have been a female.

They are said to be around 17 feet in length and said to live around 205 million years ago in the Triassic period. These species are considered to have lived in a tropical rain forest, which was quite different from current West Texas.

The skulls looked quite different when they were unearthed. It was suspected that they might be a new species and it has now been unveiled that it is new specie. Study co-author Bill Mueller said that one of the two phytosaurs was having a larger skull and was said to have come from a phytosaur that might be around 18 feet long.