It was 16 feet (4.8 meters) long and tipped the scales at 900 lbs. (408 kilograms). With a blunt snout and powerful bite, it ate turtles and battled monster snakes. Now this extinct dyrosaur, a type of crocodilian, which roamed an ancient rainforest a few million years after the dinosaurs died, has a scientific name.

It's called Anthracosuchus balrogus after the fiery Balrog that lurked deep in the Middle-Earth mines of Moria in J.R.R. Tolkien's novel "The Lord of the Rings."

Dozens of nearly complete skeletons of prehistoric marine reptiles have been uncovered near a melting glacier in southern Chile.

Scientists found 46 specimens from four different species of extinct ichthyosaurs. These creatures, whose Greek name means "fish lizards," were a group of large, fast-swimming marine reptiles that lived during the Mesozoic Era, about 245 million to 90 million years ago.

The newly discovered skeletons are from both embryos and adults. The creatures, likely killed during a series of catastrophic mudslides, were preserved in deep-sea sediments that were later exposed by the melting glacier, the researchers said in the study, published May 22 in the journal Geological Society of America Bulletin.

Curtin University’s Dr Bill Bateman and Murdoch University’s A/Professor Trish Fleming say their findings support the hypothesis that while increasing the frequency of attack, brightly-coloured tails divert predatory attention away from the head and body, ultimately increasing a lizard’s chance of survival.

To test the theory, they created 48 models of a scincid lizard, half of which were coloured all brown, and half given blue tails.

Pairs of blue-tailed and all-brown lizards were placed in 24 locations, with pairs 300 metres apart, and individuals 25 metres apart, in semi-open conditions on white sand or leaf litter.

Over a week, the researchers assessed damage and damage location daily, recording attacks at 23 of 24 locations, with 65 incidences in total, 60 of which were attributed to birds.

The researchers found that all-brown models suffered an attack to the tail only twice, while blue-tailed models lost their tails on 11 occasions.

The all-brown models were also more frequently attacked on the head and body, which would likely be fatal for a real lizard.

Years ago, Reptile Gardens Public Relations Director Johnny Brockelsby, son of the founder, sent documentation to Guinness of the more than 200 species housed at the attraction. But he never heard a word.

This month, someone mentioned that the 260-page 2014 edition of the venerable record book featured Reptile Gardens and Brockelsby immediately ran out and bought a copy.

“I was shocked but absolutely thrilled,” Brockelsby said Thursday. “We have always claimed we were the world’s largest, but everybody claims they are the biggest this or the biggest that. But when the new book came out naming us the largest reptile collection in the world, it immediately gave us credibility.”

The existing dead sample was assumed to be a labelling error and the snake was largely struck from taxonomic registries.

But Daniel Mulcahy, a researcher for the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, suspected it might still exist. He and Juan Martinez Gomez of Mexico's Ecology Institute set out to find it.

Martinez Gomez, an expert on the Revillagigedo Islands, noted the islands change a lot from season to season, so they timed the expedition last May to replicate Beebe's steps as they looked for the snake, which blends in with the island's rock formations and is largely active at night. And they used Beebe's original field notes as a guide.

"Basically, following those directions, we essentially put ourselves in his place," Martinez Gomez said.

One of his graduate students, Juan Alberto Cervantes, was the first to spot one of the snakes for the first time since 1936.

The researchers performed DNA analysis to establish the long, dark spotted snake as its own species and see where it had come from.

As beachgoers watched in awe at Langdon Beach on Gulf Islands National Seashore, two Gulfarium specialists carefully removed Tinkerbell, a 20-pound green sea turtle, and Wendy, a 14-inch Kemp's ridley, from large plastic containers and carried them to an inviting, calm and azure Gulf.

The turtles flapped their flippers furiously in anticipation of freedom as Rachel Cain and Samantha Fuentes carried them to the edge of the surf. Then with a splash punctuated by cheers from the crowd of onlookers, the two turtles swam with purpose toward open water, their shadowy shapes darting here and there under the clear sea.