A 9-foot-tall beast with bladelike teeth once stalked the warm and wet environs of what is now North Carolina some 230 million years ago, before dinosaurs came onto the scene there, scientists have found.
Now called Carnufex carolinensis, the crocodile ancestor likely walked on its hind legs, preying on armored reptiles and early mammal relatives in its ecosystem, the researchers say.
They named it Carnufex, meaning "butcher" in Latin, because of its long skull, which resembles a knife, and its bladelike teeth, which it likely used to slice flesh off the bones of prey, said lead study author Lindsay Zanno, of NC State University and the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. "'Butcher' seemed a very appropriate way to get that into the minds of people," Zanno told Live Science in an interview.
This is a part of the early Pseudosuchians, which are largely included in the archosaurs. The big forms, as with the large dinosaurs, did not survive the K-T extinction
Not sure if my previous comment posted but I was wondering which direction the measurement of 9 feet is. Is it from foot to hip or what?
ReplyDeleteStanding height, as nearly as the stories seem to suggest. I have not read the scientific paper yet.
ReplyDeleteTerrifying in any case. Glad I wasn't around to see this. I think that animals like this provide some part of a cumulative case against young earth creationism. I mean seriously, if humans had to contend with velociraptors, standing/running crocodiles, those terrifying wolf-croc things, etc. would we have had time to worry about building any kind of tent?
DeleteAs a side note I had the chance to see Supercroc at Sternberg Museum in Hays, Kansas. That was an awesome sight to behold.
As I mentioned in my recent post on the Salamander from Hell, there are simply too many really huge animals running around to escape the attention of the writers of Genesis, even if it was before the flood. You half expect to read in the table of nations, where so and so begat so and so but so and so had no children because he was gobbled up by an Allosaurus. Titanoboa would have scared the crap out of most people, at the time.
DeleteAnd how does a snake like Titanoboa end up four-fifths of the way up the geological column, anyway? Snakes can't fly and they sure as heck can't climb that fast.
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