Real-Life DinoCrocs Crushed the Competition
By Brian Switek
Some clades get all the love. Dinosaurs are at the top of the list. For the past century and a half they have been the icons of lost worlds and extinctions, and the even greater variety of life that lived alongside them is often treated as a motley aggregation of “also-rans.” Crocs, in particular, have reason to be jealous. When a dinosaur impersonates a croc, it’s news, but when crocs steal a few pages from the dinosaur’s evolutionary playbook, no one seems to notice.
In 1998 news sources heralded the discovery of Suchomimus – the dinosaurian “crocodile mimic.” One of the bizarre spinosaurs, this fish-eating predator had a long, low skull full of conical teeth vastly different from the deep, knife-toothed skulls of other large predators like Tyrannosaurus, Allosaurus, and Ceratosaurus. So unusual was this dinosaur that it seems to have been the inspiration for two bare-bones b-movies – DinoCroc, and, of course, DinoCroc versus SuperGator. What few people know, however, is that one group of crocs also imitated fearsome dinosaurian predators.
Paleontologists Douglas Riff and Alexander Kellner described the characteristics of the true dinocrocs in a paper recently published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. In particular, they focused on a complete specimen of the crocodyliform Stratiosuchus maxhechti from the approximately 90 to 83 million year old strata of Brazil. This creature was unlike any croc alive today.
All modern crocodylians – alligators, crocodiles, gharials, caimans, and the like – are aquatic ambush predators that have been doing their thing for about 84 million years or so. But take a step back and look at their larger family – the crocodyliforms – and the diversity and disparity in the group is fantastic. There were entirely marine forms like Dakosaurus, genera like Armadillosuchus which developed complex armor shells before mammals did, and gracile little forms like Pakasuchus which had mammal-like teeth, to pick just a few.
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