The Buckingham

photo credit http://news.nationalgeographic.com

New evidence about the remains of a behemoth crocodile discovered in the 1960s, in the Lake Turkana Basin in Kenya, have come to light paleontologists say.

Study leader Christopher Brochu cites this croc to be the largest known true crocodile that ever lived.  Other giant crocodyliforms may have grown up to 40-foot-long, but this fossil, a direct ancestor of the modern Nile croc could have reached lengths of 27-foot.

The scientists hypothesize that one of Crocodylus thorbjarnarsoni’s main food sources was early man.  Smaller than modern man, our four-foot-tall ancestors would easily have been swallowed whole by these river monsters.

Crocodiles now and then have incredible digestive systems that would have devoured every bit of a skeleton leaving no fossils.  Alex Hastings, of the University of Florida, who discovered a prehistoric crocodile species in 2011, speculates that these crocs may have been apex predators.  And man was not always the most powerful animal in the jungle.

Brochu hopes, above all else, that evidence such as this new crocodile, puts the final bucket of water on a wicked witch of an idea that crocodiles are living fossils.  That somewhere they have escaped the usual evolutionary trail is simply not true.  Crocodile’s “evolution is just as complex and rich as [that of] any other group,” Brochu said.

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