Ancient 'Godzilla' Crocodile Discovered

SenseOfHumor writes "Paleontologists have discovered a huge crocodile which was a predator of large sea creatures. A Jurassic-age crocodile had the massive jaws and jagged teeth needed to hunt large sea prey, paleontologists say. The crocodile, nicknamed Godzilla, was nearly four metres long with a short snout like a T. rex, four fins and a vertical, fishlike tail." Photos and drawings are available at National Geographic, and more science at ScienceDaily.

Comments

Not that huge

[Anonymous Coward]

How this could be a "huge" crocodile? wikipedia lists crocs bigger than that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocodile

Re:Not that huge

[Audacious]

Yeah, I went "Say what?" when they said 4 METERS! The Smithsonian had a snake on display one time that wound through four rooms and was large enough to eat an elephant whole. THAT was large! (And a bit scary too!) Made me nervous just seeing how large it was and thinking what I'd do if I met such a creature (like mess my pants and run like crazy!).

But then, if you have never gone to Washington D.C. and gone to the Smithsonian - you need to make the trip. The natural sciences building has all sorts of fantastic things on display. They had a wooly mammoth on display when I was there as well. Huge beast. But no where near as scary as that giant snake.

The got'cha was the skeleton of the T-Rex they had hidden behind a turn. You came around the turn and there it was with it's mouth open ready to bite you in half. I heard several people make half-screams (those little eeps!) when they came to it. Strangely my first reaction was to sock the thing one until I realized it was just a skeleton. I guess the old fight or flight thing was in overdrive after having been shocked with the snake.

Zonk you pulling another 48er?

[seanvaandering]

Check these timestamps...

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That would be almost 14 hours solid on Slashdot, with a break provided by samzenpus at 1pm - is it really that bad to work for CmdrTaco? :)

Re:Snouts

[Nazadus]

I'm not a zoologist, however if I had to venture a guess:
The snouts lengths increased as it began eawting more water based creaters than land based. Fish would seem allot easier to catch and eat (this saving energy) than a bear or whatever.

Having a longer snout would also make it harder to close if it catches something at the bare end of it's teeth -- since it's something small like fish, it doesn't matter. But if it's a bigger animal (like a Dinosaur), I would assume that having a smaller but more potent (size matters here, just inversly) would be *much* more beneficial.

They are cold blooded creatures, so the more energy they save -- the better off they are.

This is just a guess on my part though.

Not very exceptional

[Belseth]

The largest crocodile fossils found so far have mostly been in South America, there have been large ones found in Texas as well. The biggest so far was around 50', at last word. That would dwarf the new find. I would have said the fish shaped tail made it unique but that's not the first time for that feature. Actually sounds fairly unexceptional so far. Have to check out the NG issue and see if there's more to it. 19' to 21' is the accepted high end for salt water Crocs but there have been larger ones found. I have heard reliable stories about one just under 30' which is possible but I think that would be an extreme high end and the animal would be over 100 years old. There was a Nile found recently that I saw film of that seemed to be north of 20', I believe they called it Gustav. I've seen film of 19' crocs and this one was considerably larger. Personally I think it was well north of 20', not 25' or 30' but definately bigger than 20'. At first they thought it was over 60 but later decided it was closer to 35 which gave it a lot of growth potential. It would seem to support the idea that the real high end is 25' to 30'. I doubt many ever reached that size given most simply don't live long enough. Even Gustav seems to have died around the time it was filmed and hasn't been seen since. The poor animal even had machine gun wounds on it's side. I'd be surprised if any currently alive were over 21'.

I'm recovering, but...

[MattW]

I still thought of this.

Has Slashdot hit a new High?

[POds]

Wikipedia now include templates that state certain articles have been linked to slashdot, and thus require extra attention :|

[quote]
This article has recently been linked from Slashdot (backlink).
Please keep an eye on the page history for errors or vandalism.
[/quote]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estuarine/Saltwater_C rocodile