Paleonto-logists have unearthed fossils of what they believe is a giant prehistoric crocodile with a shield-like skull that may have preyed on 13-foot-long fish in Moroccan rivers some 100 million years ago.
The crocodile is known by a chunk of skull excavated in Morocco and acquired by the Royal Ontario Museum of Canada from a collector. Only now palaeontologists have examined the skull and determined that it belonged to a new — and enormous — species.
It looks like the animal probably had a head size of two meters,” study researcher Casey Holliday, a professor of anatomical sciences at the University of Missouri, was quoted as saying by LiveScience.
Even more intriguingly, Holliday said, the animal had a shield-like structure on the top of its skull that would have supported skin and blood vessels much like the frills of horned dinosaurs like triceratops. It’s likely that “shieldcroc”, as it is called, would have used this structure for display, he said. The newly-surfaced chunk of crocodile skull reveals that shieldcroc was a member of a group called the eusuchians, a lineage that includes modern crocodiles and alligators.
Shieldcroc is the first confirmed eusuchian ever found in Africa.
Extrapolating from the size of shieldcroc’s braincase suggests that the animal grew to lengths of 50 to 60 feet, a size that Holliday called “pretty ridiculous”. — PTI