Thursday, November 19, 2009

Cretaceous Gondwanan Crocodyliform Diversity


A suite of five ancient crocs, including one with teeth like boar tusks and another with a snout like a duck's bill, have been discovered in the Sahara by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Paul Sereno. The five fossil crocs, three of them newly named species, are remains of a bizarre world of crocs that inhabited the southern land mass known as Gondwana some 100 million years ago.

Sereno, a professor at the University of Chicago, and his team unearthed the strange crocs in a series of expeditions beginning in 2000 in the Sahara. Many of the fossils were found lying on the surface of a remote, windswept stretch of rock and dunes. The crocs galloped and swam across present-day Niger and Morocco when broad rivers coursed over lush plains and dinosaurs ruled.

"These species open a window on a croc world completely foreign to what was living on northern continents," Sereno said. The five crocs, along with a closely related sixth species, will be detailed in a paper published in the journal ZooKeys and appear in the November 2009 issue of National Geographic magazine. The crocs also will star in a documentary, "When Crocs Ate Dinosaurs," to premiere at 9 p.m. ET/PT Saturday, Nov. 21, on the National Geographic Channel.


Extensively covered here, here, here, here, here, and here at least. Paper here.

2 comments:

Nick said...

These are some very cool new taxa. I am very excited to see how integrating them and the new characters in Sereno and Larsson's analysis will change the results of my crocodyliform supermatrix.

Cheers,
Nick

Will Baird said...

They are very interesting. The Mesozoic gets more and more interesting. The Cenozoic looks pretty boring in comparison ecologically.