Paleoworld- Ancient Crocodiles

there was a time long ago when the earth shook with the footsteps of monsters giants so huge so fearsome and scarcely imagine them as living creatures not even the great t-rex dare confront them they were not dinosaurs they survived their relatives to lie in wait at the edge of jungle rivers and at the edges of our deepest fears they were the giant crocodiles perhaps the greatest killers that have ever lived this is a crocodile hunt and few creatures strike such terror in our hearts their alien eyes reflect no feelings their smile holds no warmth no sympathy runs through their cold blood they are dragons from an older age the greatest predators of a long lost world that forgotten world is slowly coming to light and its secrets are of stunning proportions once there were giant crocodiles that thrived alongside the dinosaurs and today two have become known as the greatest of their kind their story is an extraordinary tale of extinction and survival a tale that reveals why after some 200 million years the crocodile is still smiling our hunt begins in an unexpected place the high desert landscape of southern Texas this is Big Bend National Park at the end of the 20th century but another world once stood here and we must ride back on the hot dry winds of time to find it some 75 million years ago Big Bend was a very different wilderness the dinosaurs had yet to meet their cataclysmic end and they flourished here in a lush tropical jungle rich with tidal marshes and lagoons rivers found their way south to the shallow sea and groups of hadrosaurs would have stopped here for a drink never suspecting they were risking their lives waiting for them in the murky waters was a monster called Deinosuchus its name means terrible crocodile and it dealt in terrible death in one awful instant thirsty hadrosaurs were face-to-face with gaping jaws and a killer that used the river to cover its tracks now 75 million years later the dried-out riverbed is giving up its own victims surrendering to the wind the bones it varied so long ago news of some extraordinary bones brings a team of paleontologists out into the desert they have come a long way to track down a crocodile that after millions of years still knows where to hide leading the team is veteran crocodile expert professor Wan Langston of the University of Texas he is joined by crocodile expert art Busbee and young paleontologist Chris Brochu heading deep into the wilderness of Big Bend they follow the course of the ancient riverbed leading to the most significant fine of Deinosuchus fossils in 30 years well at any discovery of Deinosuchus is exciting because they're so they're so rare I've been looking for fossils in the Big Ben since 1938 I've perhaps seen a couple of dozen fragmentary pieces of Deinosuchus in that period of time so we know they were here we've got to keep looking for them every time you find a piece perhaps it'll be a whole crocodile the team have planned to spend a week in the field here to search for more fossil evidence of the mighty crocodile it's detective work that requires keen powers of observation only the trained eye of the expert paleontologists can pick out the bones from the bedrock a section of jaw and a few scattered teeth fragments of this crocodiles smile that seemed intended to tease in fact no significant body bones of Deinosuchus have ever been found it's likely that the ancient River claimed the body bones for itself washing them downstream to be lost forever so far only broken parts of the massive skulls have been left behind the team works with the hope of finding something new anything that will contribute to our understanding of this amazing beast using modern crocodiles as a guide they've been able to speculate about the body they have yet to find this jawbone of Deinosuchus was excavated by Langston and Big Bend in the 1960s from the ratio of head to body found in crocodiles today Langston can pace out the creatures full length 30 feet the estimates reveal the fearsome probability that this predator measured at least 30 feet long stood four feet high and weighed more than 10,000 pounds here was a creature that could hunt on land and in water a creature of flesh and blood teeth and bone as massive as an 18-wheeler it was a time of giants of crocodiles the size of bull elephants and if this was the predator what on earth was its intended victim seventy-five million years ago the moon looked down on a very different Texas at the edge of tropical rivers and swamps Deinosuchus the terrible crocodile of Big Bend looked for something to eat it would have found hadrosaurs thirty-foot vegetarians that grazed at the water's edge hadrosaur bones have been found alongside those of Deinosuchus linked forever in death what from the time of their earliest origins they were connected as more than just predator and prey over 200 million years ago crocodiles and dinosaurs shared a common ancestry since then the crocodiles have made their own way through the twists and turns of evolution the earliest crocodile was a modest reptile about 3 feet in length the generations that followed evolved into both marine animals and the semi aquatic ancestors of today's crocodiles around the world along the way they experimented with incredible forms as well as the giant ones there were crocodiles with hooves and even a distinct line of crocodiles with fins they live on today a family of survivors predators as effective now as they were in the distant past if they hold a secret to success it may lie inside their smiling jaws for all were armed with fearsome killing teeth the teeth of Deinosuchus were large blunt conical pegs like those of its modern relatives they were not for chewing but for ripping chunks out of its prey to be swallowed with a gulp art Busby studies the hunting techniques of modern crocodiles to gain insight into the behavior of their ancient relatives based on the size of this massive lower jaw of Deinosuchus and comparison with modern crocodilians like this alligator we can look at how far can open its jaws I would say that Deinosuchus could open its jaws at least 2 or 3 feet and this would have allowed it to take down small dinosaurs Deinosuchus had a skull shaped more like this modern crocodile of course much much larger crocodiles eat by waiting at the water's edge and then when the prey gets close they open them out from one forward grab destroy a roll pull the fray back into the water so that they can drown it imagine a crocodile more than twice this size a 30-foot hadrosaur and its jaws a clash of titans but the contest between dinosaurs and crocodiles was soon to be over for some serious reason the dinosaurs were to die out leaving room for the greatest crocodile the world has ever known in one of the greatest mysteries in the history of life on earth the dinosaurs the ruling reptiles disappeared and stranger still was the survival of their close relative the crocodile whatever killed the dinosaurs did not affect them and once the dinosaurs were gone crocodiles became the mindless creatures on earth it was here deep in the Amazon basin that crocodiles reached they're fearful Zenith rare fossil fragments tell of a Leviathan known as poor Soros in 1986 having heard rumors of this river giant paleontologist dr. David Fraley from Johnson Community College in Kansas came to the Amazon basin on a crocodile hunt of his own for three weeks Fraley traveled along thousands of miles of tributaries scanning the banks for just the right sediments these our waters were crocodilians still abound alligators and Caymans may lurk just beneath the peaceful surface fray Lee's expedition penetrated deep into the Western headwaters of the Amazon wild country scarcely explored even today it wasn't until just before he was due to leave that he found what he was searching for the fossil find of a lifetime this is a tremendous animal I was known know this uh Peru soros has been known as 1892 and we'd find pieces of it we find a fragment here a tooth along the way and we knew they were around but we really didn't expect to find anything like this so hard to imagine such a giant creature it was a stroke of incredible luck in a warm wet tropical climate organic matter even bone decays rapidly this fossil had somehow worked its way to the surface still intact even so this was one croc that almost got away it's hard to believe that you can miss a fossil that's sitting on plain sight and yet we walked right by it the first time working our way as we usually do working and making our stops as we go up the river this had not looked like a very likely sight and we've gone right on by it and then coming back sort of an accident really to stop and check out that that one locality climbing down to double-check a small area of exposed riverbank Fraley was amazed to find the upturned crocodile skull there was lying out in plain view completely in plain view and knew that it was something Spectre the exposed tooth sockets could only be from an ancient meat-eater this was physical proof that poor asaurus was larger than anyone had imagined for a moment David Fraley felt the imposing presence of the greatest crocodile in history when I saw the tooth thought I knew it for a sort only thing could be it's the only thing out here this big it had to be this creature when I first walked up on that I couldn't believe I was dumbfounded by size and realized we had a lot of work to move this thing that must weigh 500 pounds but it's a something you really can't leave behind either so we had to give it a try but as we pride on it after I began to come apart in the pieces and the largest piece took four people to move it down to the boat the side of the canoe in the canoe bed like that and that's how we came down the river was Camilla's tail out of the water 30 miles downstream the lower jaw of a Perot Soros was recovered and proved to be a perfect match fitted together it made up the largest crocodile skull ever found the complete head is five feet long two and a half feet wide with massive two inch wide teeth based on the dimensions of this skull Frehley estimates that poor asaurus was 50 feet long up to 9 feet wide and could have stood five feet high when walking it would have weighed a massive 18 tons ten tons more than Tyrannosaurus Rex and nearly three times more than Deinosuchus crocodiles continue to grow as they age and Frehley believes there was almost no limit to how big poor asuras could become his benchmark is the black caiman a modern Amazon alligator whose skull is dwarfed by the ten million year old porous horas based on his analysis of the skull he estimates 10 feet of body length for each foot of skull this go does 5 feet length so it's we can estimate 50 feet for total body length of this animal and it shows no sign of old age it has no reduced numbers of teeth or not not any sign of physical senescence you might associate with an old animal so it could have grown longer 60 feet 70 feet eventually it would have been too large to survive but this one is without at its maximum size yet in order to understand why these Crocs grew to such size Fraley has been investigating the climate and habitats of the Amazon ten million years ago in poor asuras time the world was warmer and the Amazon was not a river at all Fraley believes that a massive lake system more than two thousand miles wide covered almost the whole of Peru and western Brazil and like the Amazon of today it was a great theater of evolution in warm stable climates animals do not face wide swings and living conditions so they can specialise in to a huge variety of species in numerous swampy lagoons and brackish ponds crocodiles even giant ones could easily lie hidden waiting to ambush water turtles and slow-moving catfish they may even have preyed on large mammals that came to drink in their waters attacking with stealth and lightning speed this was caca dial paradise no other predator in this watery wilderness could compete with them but something drove the poorest ores to grow so huge so fierce so competitive and the only rival that could have had was another [ __ ] asaurus not only does an animal have to compete with other species for its place in nature it also has to compete with members of its own species they want exactly the same food the same territory the same nesting size every requirement is the same and in that sort of competition amongst the members of one species giant size has a definite advantage when you look at per source the large size of that animal the competition has been extremely fit poor asuras greatest enemies were others of its own kind it was relentless competition with each other that pushed them to the limits of their physical potential but enormous size conferred short-lived success and ultimately sowed the seeds of their downfall the world was changing time was running out for the Giants of the Amazon by becoming such a giant the poorest horas of the Amazon had in its own way become an extremist throughout their long history crocodiles had always been masters of multiple worlds moving freely between land and water eating just about anything they cared to catch but a giant can't afford such flexibility an extreme creature living at the edge of its limits is in dire trouble if it must face sudden and severe change dr. Fraley believes that large-sized is an adaptive strategy being big gives you the advantage over your own species but eventually even the largest individuals bump up against other factors the problem with specialization is that these species are most closely tied to the environment and if the environment changes the first become extinct something upset the stable world of the poor asaurus and the climate began to change seas retreated locked away in new polar icecaps and out of a vast lake the Amazon River itself was born David Fraley believes the extinction of poor asaurus was linked to such a dramatic change in the environment these extreme crocodiles it seems were not able to adapt to the dawning of a new world although we have this fantastic skull there's still a great deal about press orisons world we don't know out there someplace his answer the answers will wait as long as the jungle still holds their bones and their secrets it is said that nothing lives forever the two greatest crocodiles in history the fearsome Deinosuchus and the great poor asaurus have long since met their fate but crocodiles are with us still living proof of the durability of their design masters of the special world were land and water meet the crocodiles are a family of survivors rising with the dinosaurs some 200 million years ago it's the crocodiles that have stood the test of time their modern descendants give us a tantalizing glimpse of the awesome power of a natural born killer you

Channel: Paleoworld101

Views: 182,889

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Keywords: paleoworld, paleo world, ancient crocodiles, prehistoric crocodiles, crocodile, evolution, discovery, channel, TLC (TV Channel), Discovery Channel, dinosaurs, nature, wildlife, animals, deinosuchus, purrusaurus

Id: DXjbcImbO-k

Length: 23min 28sec (1408 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 22 2012