It shares with earlier stem tetrapods a series of lateral lines across the skull, rows of teeth on the palate, and small Meckelian foramina across the surface of the lower jaw.

[4] The quarry preserves a pair of prehistoric bowl-shaped sinkhole deposits which collapsed into underlying muddy limestone layers of the Waugh and Verdi members of the St. Louis Formation.

Most tetrapod fossils are concentrated in a narrow band of fine limy conglomerate deposited above a package of coarser breccia (from the initial collapse) and below the resurgence of muddy limestone.

[1] Freshwater fish fossils are common,[4][1][5] including remains of rhizodonts, putative "osteolepiforms", "palaeoniscoids", xenacanth sharks, petalodont-like chondrichthyans,[4][5] gyracanthid acanthodians,[4] and the lungfish Tranodis.

A modern analogue may be the duckbilled platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus), a mammal which swims at low speed but high maneuverability via a paddling motion of the forelimbs.

In life, Whatcheeria potentially hunted by walking along lakebeds or wading through shallow water, using its relatively flexible neck to augment its ability to capture prey.

[7] The unusually narrow skull of Whatcheeria was strongly reinforced by complex modes of contact between its constituent bones, similar to the Devonian tetrapod Acanthostega.

This may correspond to greater strength (and thus more reinforcement) at the front of the jaw when attacking prey, a notion supported by larger anterior fangs in Whatcheeria than other early tetrapods.

There are no adaptations for cranial kinesis or suction feeding in Whatcheeria; as a whole, its skull was a stable and strong platform for biting, with an emphasis on the front of the snout for initial prey capture.

The presence of fibrolamellar bone is unique to Whatcheeria among early tetrapods, and is an indicator of fast juvenile development more similar to amniotes than most extinct or living amphibians.

[7] The presence of parallel-fibered bone also indicate that the smallest known femora merely represent late juveniles, and that younger individuals, which likely developed even faster, have not been fossilized at the Delta locality.