Scientists have found evidence that an Australian dinosaur was eaten by a new species of crocodile that lived 95 million years ago.
An Australian rock formation known for its Cretaceous dinosaur fossils, the Winton Formation, is where crocodile fossils were first discovered in 2010.
Fossils of the crocodile were found to contain numerous small bones that belonged to another species. They’ve now been confirmed by experts at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum to be dinosaur remains. Gondwana Research, a peer-reviewed journal, published their findings on Friday.
Over 8 feet long, Confractosuchus sauroktonos, a freshwater crocodile, was known as “the broken dinosaur killer,” It would have been much larger, according to Matt White, a museum research associate and the museum’s lead researcher. The manner of the crocodile’s death was a mystery to the experts.
The tail and limbs of the animal were lost, but the skull was nearly complete. The bones in the remains were then examined using X-rays and computed tomography (CT) scans.
The findings revealed that the bones belonged to a 4-pound juvenile ornithopod, a plant-eating dinosaur species that included creatures with duck-billed bills. As a newly discovered species, the ornithopod’s remains are the first of their kind to be found in Australia.
One of the ornithopod’s femurs had been “sheared in half” and the other had a bite mark so hard a tooth mark remained inside the crocodile’s stomach. The Confractosuchus “either killed the animal directly or scavenged it quickly after its death,” researchers concluded.
In spite of the fact that Confractosuchus would not have been specialized in eating dinosaurs, it would not have overlooked an easy meal, like the young ornithopod remains found in its stomach,” White stated.
The discovery is the first proof that crocodiles were eating dinosaurs in Australia, which makes the find “extremely rare” given the scarcity of other confirmed cases of dinosaurs being preyed upon. “Terror crocodiles” that had teeth “the size of bananas” were discovered in August 2020 by researchers.
Dinosaurs, according to White, “It is likely dinosaurs constituted an important resource in the Cretaceous ecological food web,” With no other specimens to compare, this prehistoric crocodile and its final meal will continue to shed light on the relationships and behaviors of animals that lived in Australia millions of years ago.”
