ARGENTINA: Scientists discover the skull of a 135 million-year-old marine crocodile

A bizarre marine crocodile that lived 135 million years ago in what is now Argentina had the head of a dinosaur and the tail of a fish, palaeontologists have announced. The finding sheds new light on an animal that millions of years ago dominated Earth's seas. A team of palaeontologists led by Zulma Gasparini of Argentina's La Plata University collected a skull and parts of a vertebrae in the northwestern province of Neuquen in 1996. They were alerted to the area by a group of local farmers who stumbled across several fragments. Scientists on Gasparini's team are calling the beast "Godzilla." "We were referring to it in an informal way. And it then occurred to use that it's better to use the monster from the movie Godzilla. Because it's a mix, really, of dinosaur and crocodile, which comes out of the sea and walks over New York. Well, this is not a dinosaur, it's a crocodile which surely wreaked terror, but in the sea. It never had the ability to emerge onto land," said Gasparini. Experts spent a painstaking three years chipping the rock which Godzilla's skull was found in away from the bone. But with the work finally done, the results are impressive. Juan Jose Moly, head of the University's Department of the Preparation of Vertebrates, said the work was a delicate process given the fragility of some of the parts involved. "I am in this museum twenty five years, and it must be the one that took the longest. Apart from that, the importance of the piece was that it had some very delicate areas, like the sclerotic ring, the part of the eye, which are little plates which make up what was the eye, and it has the part of the teeth which were not uncovered. And the film that coats the teeth is similar in thickness to the shell of an egg, so that you understand the fragility," he explained. Scientists named the previously unknown species Dakosaurus andiniensis, after a European crocodile from the same period that shares some similar characteristics. With flipper-like feet and a tail like those found on fish, the crocodile is believed to have been about 12 feet or 4 meters long. For Gasparini, the most important characteristic of this new find is that it lived in the sea rather than on land. "The thing that is new, and of the biggest impact, is to have found a crocodile, without doubt a crocodile with a dinosaur aspect, living in the sea. That is to say a morphology that any palaeontologist or biologist would expect to find on land, while this animal was adapted to life in the sea," she explained. The animal boasted a short and high snout, unlike the long, thin snouts found on many of today's crocodiles. The crocodile also had large sharp teeth -- 13 in all -- that paleontologists say were more often found in dinosaurs. To imagine it, throw out the image of today's green, teeth-exposed beast that quickly moves between land and water. The Dakosaurus, paleontologists say, was an animal that had four paddle-like limbs instead of legs, using its fish-like tail to propel through water. It likely fed on reptiles and other large sea life when it roamed the Pacific Ocean off southwestern South America millions of years ago, they say.

ITN Source | November 17, 2005

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