Nigerpeton

Nigerpeton (Niger, for the country, and herpeton (Greek), meaning crawler) is an extinct genus of crocodile-like temnospondyls from the late Permian (Changhsingian) period. These temnospondyls lived in modern-day Niger, which was once part of central Pangaea, about 250 million years ago. Nigerpeton is a member of the Cochleosauridae family, a group of edopoid temnospondyl amphibians known from the late Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian) and early Permian (Cisuralian).

== History and discovery == Joulia was the first to publish a notice of vertebrate remains in the Permian Moradi Formation, located in northern Niger in 1960. In the late 1960s, French paleontologists set out on three short expeditions to this formation but only described a single taxon, the captorhinid reptile Moradisaurus grandis. Taquet in 1978 was the first to mention any temnospondyl remains in the Upper Permian rocks in northern Niger but did not describe the fossils. In their 1982 description of the Moradisaurus grandis skull, Ricqlès and Taquet reported finding numerous temnospondyl remains during their three expeditions in the 1960s.