Prehistoric croc had teeth strong enough to chomp a T-rex
‘Bone cruncher’ was top of the food chain
Today’s Madagascar is the land of lemurs, big-eyed creatures among the most huggable on the planet. But no one would want to hug the beast that once ruled this landscape.
Fossils reveal that 170 million years ago, a giant crocodile with serrated teeth like a Tyrannosaur rex haunted Madagascar. Powerful jaws and sharp-edged teeth signal it was an über-predator. Even the advanced meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods weren’t immune.
The croc “could challenge a theropod dinosaur,” says vertebrate paleontologist Cristiano Dal Sasso of Italy’s Natural History Museum of Milan, co-author of a new study on the fearsome reptile. “You have an animal that was really a bone-cruncher” — and as big as a pickup to boot.
The primitive croc had an estimated 46 to 48 teeth, which it could replace repeatedly if one fell out. Some teeth were serrated like steak knives. Not even T. rex had bigger serrations on its teeth, Dal Sasso says.
Tooth damage suggests the croc, known as Razanandron-gobe sakalavae, or “Razana” for short, was crunching on bones and tendons, the researchers say in a study published in the journal PeerJ. It probably ate whatever it wanted, including dinosaurs.
Del Sasso suspects Razana was both a scavenger and an ambush predator, bursting out of hiding to bring down its prey. Unlike its living relatives, the croc probably strolled on upright legs, the researchers say.
As a result, “it was probably capable of pretty good speeds and probably more efficient running than modern crocodiles,” which can achieve 20 mph in short bursts, says Joe Sertich of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, who was not associated with the new study.
If the study is correct, Razana belongs to a “bizarre family of (extinct) crocs that were fully adapted to living on land,” says Diego Pol of Argentina’s Egidio Feruglio Museum, also not part of the study team.