#mourasuchus

It's June 17th, world crocodile day, a day to appreciate these amazing yet endangered animals. They are my personal favourite group of animals period and just endlessly fascinating to me, both those we have today and those that lived in the ancient past. Tho I'm no professional by any means, I strive to learn about them and spread this knowledge. So here's some photos, art and skeletals of fossil crocs (using the term rather liberally I know). Feel free to drop your favourites in the reblogs, doesn't matter if extinct or not.

Here's a series of commissioned illustrations I made for one of my patrons. They all depict fauna from the Urumaco formation of Venezuela, an assemblage mostly composed of Miocene fossils.

1.  A group of Xenastrapotherium - astrapotheres were a peculiar group of superficially tapir-like mammals from South America and Antarctica. They often sported tusks and small "trunks", and are thought to have been partially amphibious.

2.  A dead megalodon has washed ashore and attracts the attention of the giant caiman Purussaurus, along with other smaller crocodilians and relatives of modern Jabiru storks. The coastal waters of Venezuela are thought to have been a nursery for baby megalodon and possibly the only place where these two giant predators could have met.

3. Mourasuchus was a very large caiman with a distinctly flat head and numerous small teeth which it could have used to filter-feed. It coexisted with river dolphins and mata-mata turtles in the rivers of Miocene Venezuela.

4. Stupendemys was a giant side-necked turtle that may have rivaled the seafaring Archelon for the title of largest turtle to have ever lived. It inhabited northern South America during the Miocene and Pliocene, and its closest living relative is the much smaller Arrau turtle from the Amazon region.

Here's a fun fact, during the early to middle Miocene the north of South America was covered by an enormous wetland system sometimes known as the Pebas Megawetlands, which was home to one of the single most-diverse collection of crocodilians in history.

Among them were a "small" species of Purussaurus that preyed on ground sloths, South American gharials, three different types of small caimans that fed on clams, a relative of todays dwarf caimans and the weird, surf-board headed Mourasuchus, all of which were recovered from a single locality.

If you wanna see more of this I highly recommend you check out @knuppitalism-with-ue stream tomorrow night, 23:00 CEST on Twitch.

I don’t have access to the original publication that named Mourasuchus, so I can’t check what the intended etymology of the name is.

Mourasuchus - an animal of which I can genuinely find no good images - was a giant caiman from Miocene South America.  Its head was long and flat, with jaws too thin and weak to capture large prey, and it may or may not have possessed a pelican-like throat pouch.

In these respects, Mourasuchus bore an astonishing resemblance to the stomatosuchids.  However, the stomatosuchids had long since been extinct, and the presence of these features in Mourasuchus is a result of convergent evolution.