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

Now that's what I call

[external400kdiskette]

" massive jaws and jagged teeth "
"The crocodile, nicknamed Godzilla"

my idea of intelligent design :)

Re:Now that's what I call

[speed_of_light]

Not really. Intelligent design would have allowed him to speak, and given him arms and legs with which to do great things for the world. . . Wait, scratch that. It's been done. Didn't work out.

Gojira

[joe_bruin]

Clearly this proves Intelligent Design, because only God would make Godzilla, the holy lizard in His name.

Re:Gojira

[LnxAddct]

I know you were joking but...

While this isn't an interesting find because of its size, it does add to the credibility of evolution. This species is similar to ancient crocodiles, which also had more features in common with fish, i.e. their tails, but (in addition to some other changes) this fossil has a unique skull. This is a great example of another transitional fossil to add to the record, and this find follows what evolution predicted to the "T". This fossil is exactly what one form of evolution predicts, specifically convergent evolution.

For those who don't know, evolution encompasses three basic principles, or "subgroups" for lack of a better word, of evolution that further refine, explain, and predict various mutations. The other two are divergent evolution and what is often referred to as coevolution (a parasite and a host, predator and prey, or animals and flowers that depend on each other for pollination or other things often evolve in response to each other over millions of years). Granted Evolution encompasses much more than the tiny fraction of a percent mentioned here.

Evolution is such a well studied and useful science, its ashame that so many ignorant people don't understand it like they claim they do. They don't know about the 10's of thousands of transitional fossils, they haven't seen the proof, yet alone understand it. At this point in the game, there really is no arguing against evolution in any place where real science is practiced, its like arguing against gravity. These I.D. people don't realize how stupid they are making themselves look. This isn't meant to be inflammatory, its just some people need to wake the hell up.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Gojira

[letxa2000]

While this isn't an interesting find because of its size, it does add to the credibility of evolution.

Y'think? Let's see some quotes from TFA:

"The researchers don't yet know what events triggered the relatively sudden emergence of the large crocodile..."

Sounds like more data that evolution can't really explain.

"Unlike the crocodiles we know today, Dakosaurus andiniensis lived entirely in the water, and had fins instead of legs."

What part of the skull did the researches base *that* conclusion on?

" Pol used sophisticated software to map the features of those bones and determine its lineage. "

Oooohh, "sophisticated software." I trust we'll hear more about the science of how they "determined its lineage". I'm a software engineer and "sophisticated software" doesn't impress me... I want to know what this software actually did.

"It measured 13 feet from nose to tail."

Still interested in how they concluded that based on the skull. I'm assuming there must be more fossil elsewhere, but curiously none of the "technical" diagrams include more than its head. Some of the "artists concept" drawings show a little more as the thing supposedly jumps out of the water, but I've seen no technical diagrams of anything but the head which leaves me wondering where this 13-feet figure is coming from.

Then we have this:

""The most perplexing thing about the animal is that its head shape does not appear to be well suited to a fast swimming crocodilian, because rather than being streamlined, it is somewhat high and flattened from side to side," said Clark, who was not involved with the research."

So rather than contemplate other explanations (maybe it wasn't so closely related to a croc? maybe it wasn't even aquatic--sometimes mammals can actually find there way into water and die, y'know), we automatically assume this is some groundbreaking discovery? Maybe it's so weird it's wrong?

Or how about:

""If you went to a crocodile worker and said, Let's say you had a chance to evolve something new out of this group, what would you do? And you gave them a pad and a pencil, the last thing they would draw would be a skull that looks like Dakosaurus."

So this thing basically contradicts everything we think we know about crocs, but dang it, evolution is right so this is just amazing, isn't it?

This one is choice:

"It's a beautiful example of the unpredictable nature of evolution, and the variety of things that dinosaur-age crocodiles did."

And here I was thinking that science was supposed to be falsifiable, testable, and actually be a useful predictor? And here they're celebrating just how unpredictable it is? I'm glad other theories are a little more relaible. I'd hate to be walking into my house and suddenly find gravity reverse itself and hit my head on the ceiling. *

Color me unimpressed.

* Note: If gravity did reverse itself, would you be prepared? How would you keep the coins in your pocket? I have the answer: Nudity! (This poorly-quoted quote is left as an exercise for the reader to discover its source).

Mario Mayors and Disasters.

[CHESTER COPPERPOT]

You'll notice on that first photo on the National Geographic that Godzilla is in fact battling what scientists have renamed a Mothra not a pterodactyl.

Cue the....

[Chickenofbristol55]

large crowd of screaming Japanese people!

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

[mchawi]

I'm glad I'm not the only one that had this thought. I've seen Steve Irwin wrestle crocs larger than that ;)

Maybe it grows bigger if you're nice to it. Of course, maybe they're thinking 'if I drop a nuke on this I'd have Godzilla!'. Who ever knows with scientists...

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.

Re:Not that huge

[Loonacy]

Hmm... Smacking a T-Rex on the snout...
Sounds like a terrific idea to me.

Oh, please...

[rasafras]

Only 13 feet? Hell, I used to wrestle gators bigger than that in New York sewers...

Re:Oh, please...

[NanoGator]

" Hell, I used to wrestle gators bigger than that in New York sewers..."

Didja stop before or after you got your ass kicked by some punks shouting cowabunga?

CRIKEY!

[perlow]

"Now mate, look what happens when I shove my whole body up this Jurrasic croc's cloaca. She gets really grumpy, But not as grumpy as my wife!"

4 meters? Godzilla?

[ManyLostPackets]

How about this one?, big as a school bus! http://www.supercroc.com/pressarticles/msnbc.htm

Huge Crocodile! Nearly 4 meters long!

[Anon.Pedant]

Maybe the poster was so breathless from all the hype that they didn't notice that this HUGE Godzilla-like beast is SMALLER than modern crocodiles. Nile Crocodiles can be 5 meters long, while Saltwater Crocs can be over six meters. Revised headline: Paleontologists discover midget crocodile! -- Anonymous Pedant

Re:Huge Crocodile! Nearly 4 meters long!

[Artega VH]

Exactly. In fact the largest recorded Saltwater crocodile was almost 9 meters in length.

The first thing I thought when I read this (and its been in regular news sites for a day and a bit) was "mmm thats pretty small" and its especially small when compared with SuperCroc (although there is an interesting clash of largest recorded sizes for salties between those two wikipedia articles)

Re:Huge Crocodile! Nearly 4 meters long!

[itsthebin]

[Quote]Largest crocodile ever recorded? What about the big fish stories I mentioned earlier? Would you believe the largest saltwater crocodile ever reported was 10.1 m (33.1 feet)? This animal was apparently killed in the Bay of Bengal, and was so large only its head was recovered. A skull reportedly belonging to this animal was stored in the British Museum, but when it was measured later it was estimated to have come from a 15.7 ft (4.8 m) crocodile - less than half the claimed length. The skull of another claimed 29 ft (8.8 m) monster was also later determined to belong to a crocodile no larger than 16.2 ft (4.9 m). These are still big crocodiles, but typical of the exaggeration normally associated with large crocodiles. Still, some of these stories seem more credible. Saltwater crocodiles above 6 m (20.3 feet) were certainly much more common in Australia and SE Asia before extensive hunting for their skins in the 1940's, 50's and 60's wiped out the big crocodiles. Some old hunters claim to have shot animals over 8 m (26 feet) during this period (e.g. a 27 ft [8.1 m] saltwater crocodile from the Staaton River in Queensland in the early 1970's). But without reliable measurements, such records are lost to the past. These days, if you wish to convince anyone then please use a straight tape measure whilst sober from the tip of the upper jaw to the tip of the complete tail! So what is the largest crocodile ever recorded? In more recent times, there are very few reliable measurements of extremely large crocodiles, but they do exist. A skull from a saltwater crocodile from Orissa, India, was large enough to have come from a crocodile between 20 and 23 feet in length. Its true size remains a mystery. The two largest reliable records of complete animals are both from 20.3 ft (6.2 m) crocodiles: the first was shot in the Mary River in the Northern Territory of Australia in 1974 by poachers and measured by wildlife rangers; the second was killed in 1983 in the Fly River in Papua New Guinea. In this latter crocodile, it was actually the skin that was measured by zoologist Jerome Montague, and as skins are known to underestimate the size of the actual animal it's likely this crocodile was at least another 10 cm / 4 inches longer. This is my candidate for the largest crocodile ever recorded. Unfortunately, because of the time needed for wild crocodiles to reach this size, the low number of individuals which seem predisposed to reach such sizes, and problems of crocodiles conflicting with expanding human populations, it seems unlikely that we will see many of these giants again.[/quote] http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/natsci/herpetology/britto ncrocs/cbd-faq-q2.htm

We're used to old news...

[Sebilrazen]

...but come on, this is just Prehistoric.

Re:This was on Digg yesterday...

[c_forq]

seriously, I read Slashdot for the comments. I heard about this probably 36 hours ago from National Geographic (who will be featuring it in their December issue). For almost any news on slashdot I have another site I read it on first. But I have been reading slashdot for probably 2 years (and posting for a few weeks now) because I think the comments posted here and the moderation system is far more valueable then just news reports. I'm fine with dupes, slow news, and bad editors as long as there is a good amount of intelligent commentors.

Re:Let them extract the DNA

[Anon.Pedant]

You can't be serious; these are 140 million year old fossils! These are rocks, and you can be sure they won't "find a few cells." Even DNA from mammoths that have been frozen for only 10 thousand years are fragmentary.
(Or maybe I just don't get the joke.)

Size doesn't matter

[frodo from middle ea]

belive it or not mosquitos are the no. 1 killers of the modern world

Zonk you pulling another 48er?

[seanvaandering]

Check these timestamps...

Science: Ancient 'Godzilla' Crocodile Discovered
Posted by Zonk on Friday November 11, @09:48PM

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Slashback: KDE, Tsunami Hacker, and Image Bugs
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IT: Ignore Vista Until 2008
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Your Rights Online: Three Companies Shutdown For Spyware Bundling
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IT: Sony Pulls Controversial Anti-Piracy Software
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Linux: Microsoft Reports OSS Unix Beats Windows XP
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Book Reviews: Hardening Linux
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Your Rights Online: Amazon Gets Patent on Consumer Reviews
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Science: Quantum Computing Regulation Already?
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IT: Data Centers And DC Power
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Apple: Mac OS X x86 Put To The Test
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Linux: Torvalds Gets Tough on Kernel Contributors
Posted by Zonk on Friday November 11, @09:12AM

Games: Revolution Least Expensive Next-Gen Console
Posted by Zonk on Friday November 11, @08:31AM

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.

Re:Size is relative

[Colin Douglas Howell]

Sure 4 m may not seem like a giant crocodile but I don't think anyone can deny that the creature in this "photo" is a giant for sure!!

Seriously, that flying dinosaur it's going after would have to be the size of a sparrow for the scales in that picture to work!

respect_for_national_geographic--;

You can leave your respect for National Geographic alone; there's nothing wrong with the scale in that painting as long as you remember that most pterosaurs weren't huge. This croc's skull is about 2.5 feet long, with the jaws being a little over half that length, and there were plenty of pterosaurs with wingspans of a meter or less, especially during the Jurassic and earlier. It was only when the birds started diversifying in the Cretaceous, taking over all the small-flyer niches, that the remaining pterosaurs were forced to become giants.

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'.

Re:First thought...

[damsa]

Japanese people were a lot smaller back then.

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

Re:Evolution and Natural Design...

[MSBob]

This is complete nonsense and fundie gobbledygook. Go read some work by Robert Hazen or other scientists' regarding origins of life research. Not your church minister.

While there is no consensus on how the chemical reactions leading to initial living organisms occured, we have a fairly complete picture of the steps involved. Recent research shows that the odds of life forming on earth 40 billion years ago are very plausible. Some gaps remain but nothing drastic enough to negate the current scientific knowledge of the field.

Darwin's evolution has been proven time and again. I'm not even going to bother backing it. Just use Google or better go to your library and read the relevant literature. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming, crushing and undisputable. And if that wasn't enough, recent research documented (using scientific method as opposed to religious mythology) that evolution still occurs within cohorts of fruit fly populations.

Just give it up. If you have a strong set of beliefs keep them that way. Don't try to attach some pseudoscientific labels to them. Instead of being an enlightened spiritualist you'll be viewed as a dumb fundamentalist. Is that what you want?

"People should actually research things before condemning them."

Precisely.

Other breaking news from 135M years ago!

[AndroidCat]

Dispite rumours of a patch-up, members of the supercontinent Godwanaland have officially disbanded and gone their seperate ways. "It's not that I don't like them, we've just drifted apart," said ex-member Australia, "I just need to do my own thing for a while, evolve my own style. I might bump into the rest sometime later on, it's a small world." Not all members of the supercontinent have taken the break-up so well. India was last seen driving north at high-speed toward Laurasia. "Could be a bad accident if 'e doesn't slow down," one observer said.