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The
monster croc
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Dining
on dino delite
POSTED 15 NOV 2001 It was big, and it was nasty. The giant fossil crocodile, 110 million years old, looked, in the drawing, like a regular movie monster. Long as a school bus, it was almost as heavy, 8 metric tons. Sarcosuchus (SARK-oh-SOOK-us) imperator boasted a massive snout would make kiddies at a bus stop think twice before boarding a bus -- even before they saw little details like big teeth... Those teeth show that Sarky, which lived along riverbanks during the hey-day of the dinosaurs, was a carnivore. But unlike modern crocs, which tend to order turtle soup and sushi from the menu, this mayhem-meaning-monster was a regular at the dino-diner. Yup. It apparently ate dinosaurs. You can deduce that preference because its teeth did not interlock, as did the teeth of a typical fish-flaying dino.
Food fighter
The detailed picture of Sarcosuchus imperator emerges from new research by Paul Sereno, of the University of Chicago, and colleagues. When the first Sarky was found in the desert in Niger, West Africa in 1964, the bits and pieces gave only a sketchy picture of the giant carnivore. Further fossils and research (see "Giant Crocodyliform..." in the bibliography) have fleshed out the image of a creature with all the hallmarks of a 1950s Hollywood monster: Teeth. Attitude. Size.
Champion chomper
About 110 million years ago, six species of crocodiles lived at the Niger site, Sereno continued, including one midget that Sarky might have considered an appetizer. Sereno observed that crocodiles have evolved toward the golden mean -- the midgets and the giants have largely gone extinct, leaving only the mid-size units. That comment got us to wondering. Large size is good, in that big critters can push bitty ones around (although in the long run microbes rule). But if being big is such an advantage, why did giant crocs go extinct? And why did large mammals disappear after people reached Australia and North America?
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pages in this feature. Bibliography | Credits | Feedback | Search Terry Devitt, editor; Pamela Jackson, project assistant; S.V. Medaris, designer/illustrator; David Tenenbaum, feature writer; Amy Toburen, content development executive; Eric G.E. Zuelow, project assistant
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