Monday, March 12, 2007

The Mesozoic Ecology Gets a Little More Colorful


But what if there were big terrestrial predatory crocodilians during the Mesozoic? Surely such animals would have been interacting with predatory dinosaurs: living in the same places, preying on the same prey, and scavenging from the same carcasses.

[...]

The remains we have of such sebecosuchians as Baurusuchus shows that they were large animals, with body lengths exceeding 3.5 m and approaching 4 m in Stratiotosuchus. If the idea of a 4-m-long terrestrial predatory Cretaceous non-dinosaurian reptile doesn't grab your imagination, shame on you. It is veeery tempting to wonder whether, and how, sebecosuchians and theropods interacted: surely they must have. I wanted to mention this idea in my 2001 review article on crocodilians, but my reviewer urged me to remove it. Candeiro et al. (2006) however, have hinted at this idea, noting that, in some Late Cretaceous South American faunas, terrestrial crocodilians 'had a more important ecological role to play as the main carnivorous group ... than did theropods' (p. 937).

This is from Darren Naish's post.

The question is, of course, what was the earliest terrestrial gigantoform croc for the Mesozoic? Were they strictly a Maastrichtian-only phenomenon? Is this a sign of the proposed dinosaur decline 10 million years before the KT Boundary? Or was something like this around the whole time? It'd be very interesting if there was a Jurassic example!

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