The last giant ocean crocodile
Ten meters long and weighing several tonnes, this animal was the last of its kind
130 million years ago this giant croc crunched down on sea turtles
A 10-meter long, multi-tonne crocodile hunted in the seas of the early Cretaceous period, 130 million years ago, and its enormous fossilized skeleton is slowly being unearthed in Tunisia by paleontologists.
Tetsuto Miyashita, a PhD candidate in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, and his colleagues, have so far only retrieved the head of the fossil, which itself is a meter and a half long, and contains large and sturdy bullet-shaped teeth.
They suspect these teeth were adapted to crushing the thick shells of marine turtles. Machimosaurus rex was the largest, and likely the last, of the large group of ocean-going crocodiles of the Dinosaur Age.
Related Links
- Paper in Cretaceous Research
- University of Alberta release
- CBC News story
- National Geographic story