Please meet: the Cadosaurus andinensis
Kenneth Chang
The skull of the Cadosaurus andinensis, next to a computer simulation of a marine crocodile prepared by "National Geographic"
Argentina. The scientists call him "Godzilla", but in fact, he is more suitable for another movie - something between "Jaws" and "Jurassic Park". The creature in question, whose discovery was reported on Thursday in the online journal "ScienceExpress", is a large marine crocodile that lived 135 million years ago, in the midst of the age of the dinosaurs.
"It's like a crocodile with the head of a dinosaur," explained James Clark, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study. "This is something new and unusual. In the field of marine crocodile fossil research, this is a big story."
Unlike today's crocodiles, the discovered crocodile has a short snout, typical of a Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur. Its jaws, which are almost half a meter long, include 52 large, sharp teeth, the kind that are capable of tearing pieces of flesh from the body of another creature. "I guess it wasn't a pretty sight," said Diego Paul, a researcher at the Institute for Mathematical Biology at Ohio State University, who was a member of the research team. "It is a predatory animal at the top of the food chain. This animal was one of the last of its family, and undoubtedly one of the strangest creatures of the crocodile family," he added.
Although it reached about four meters in length, it was not the longest crocodile of its time, nor was it the only one that lived in water. But what is special about it is the striking difference between it and other crocodiles, which usually have a long and narrow snout, and small, sharp teeth designed to catch fish. In addition, instead of four legs, it had four pedal-like fins, and a vertical tail, like a fish.
Zulma Gasparini, a paleontologist from the National University of La Plata in Argentina, was at the head of the study, which was funded with the help of the National Geographic Company, who uncovered a fossil of a complete skull of the crocodile of the unknown species, known as Cadosaurus andinensis. The fossil was discovered as early as 1996 in the Patagonia region, but the article published now summarizes nine years of research, during which the researchers also had to carefully remove the stone covering that wrapped the fossil.
The exposure of the complete skull skeleton teaches new details about the unknown species. According to Mark Norrell, curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, ecologically, this crocodile's role may have been the same as that of today's predatory whales. And according to Dr. Paul, it apparently fed on marine reptiles, such as ichthyosaurs, which looked like dolphins, or plesiosaurs, the slow marine reptiles with long necks.
Despite the shape of the skull, which is about 33 centimeters long, which is not typical for crocodiles, it includes some special characteristics, including the shape of the nostrils, the eye sockets and the upper part of the palate, which proved that it is a crocodile after all. In a meticulous examination of the skull by Dr. Paul and comparing it with other marine crocodiles of the same age, it was found that the unknown species is similar to the group of crocodiles with fish-like fins and tails. At the time when the decosaurs lived, the area where the fossils were found was located much further north, and was deep underwater, at the bottom of a deep tropical gulf that was connected to the Pacific Ocean.
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