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.

4 meters? Godzilla?

[ManyLostPackets]

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

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 [wikipedia.org].

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 [wikipedia.org] (although there is an interesting clash of largest recorded sizes for salties between those two wikipedia articles)

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

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 [ufl.edu]

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.

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