Large, ancient crocodile found
Published 9:00 pm Thursday, November 10, 2005
WASHINGTON – Its discoverer calls it “Godzilla,” a fearsome, 13-foot seagoing crocodile with saw-teeth, a fish tail and jaws capable of ripping apart almost any other creature it encountered in the ancient ocean off what is now South America.
“There were other large sea predators in the region, but no large sharks at this time,” said Zulma Gasparini, of Argentina’s National University at La Plata, who announced the discovery of the creature’s fossil remains Wednesday. “These crocodiles were top predators.”
Gasparini and co-researcher Diego Pol, of Ohio State University, described Dakosaurus andiniensis as a unique and sophisticated species of crocodile that lived 135 million years ago and whose bullet-shaped skull looks more like that of a land-dwelling carnivore than of a sea creature.
“Dakosaurus probably fed on other large marine reptiles,” Pol said during a telephone news conference sponsored by the National Geographic Society, which partially funded the research. The team’s findings appeared in Science Express, the online version of the journal Science.
Gasparini said she first learned of the existence of D. andiniensis during a 1996 visit to a small museum in the central Argentine province of Mendoza. In a drawer, she found “bone fragments that I recognized as crocodilian.” Museum staff told her “local people found them and brought them in.” She named the species, but could find out nothing more about it.
Gasparini is one of the leading paleontologists working in the fossil beds of northwestern Patagonia’s Neuquen Basin, a treasure trove of remains of prehistoric crocodiles and other marine reptiles.
The new specimens announced Wednesday – a lower jaw and a nearly complete skull with a lower jaw – were found in the basin’s Vaca Fuerte formation. Gasparini recognized them as belonging to D. andiniensis.
The new sea monster was no fish-chaser. The jaw and snout were short, high and extremely powerful, Pol said. The jaws had relatively few teeth, but they were large and serrated on the edges – saw-teeth used for slashing and cutting, like those of land-based predatory dinosaurs.
