Sarcosuchus The Giant Crocodile

throughout the 135 million years that spanned the Jurassic and the Cretaceous period the dinosaurs were dominant with no known dinosaur land animals surpassing the size of a dock until about a hundred and thirty million years ago where at the height of the dinosaur reign a crocodile called sarcosuchus first appeared there was not only a large animal who could even rival dinosaurs in size out of the many specimens of sarcosuchus that have been discovered none of them are complete enough to tell how large they were so size estimates have to be made based on their remains many estimates have placed sarcosuchus at around 12 metres long with the weight of 8 tonnes or more which would make it the largest crocodile known to have lived however the methods used to come up with these estimates may be outdated numerous methods have been developed for the prediction of body size for extinct crocodiles from their fossils like using the length of their skull or femur and then using the proportions of living crocodiles as a reference the problem is that whereas all living crocodiles are semi aquatic prehistoric crocodiles were actually a lot more diverse in lifestyle and female and body size will vary greatly dependent on how adapted to the water or land they were furthermore prehistoric crocodiles are more diverse in skull shape as well and these problems may be exaggerated with sarcosuchus because they were actually quite distantly related to modern crocodiles and technically weren't even true crocodiles all living crocodilians diverged from a common ancestor in the Late Cretaceous about 80 million years ago the sarcosuchus diverged from there much longer ago than this and so isn't the ancestor of any living crocodiles and is technically just an ancient reptile that looks like a crocodile known as a crocodile a morph a study in 2019 found that the most accurate way to estimate ancient crocodiles and overcome these difficulties is to estimate body size with Eskil width applying this method to soccer circus would bring its length down to about nine to ten meters so soccer circus was still a giant even with this lower - stretching - almost twice the length of the largest currently living reptile the sole - crocodile and they may have weighed as much as an elephant even just their skull was almost as long as a person there are many teeth and other fragmentary remains of sarcosuchus that have been found throughout the Sahara Desert this is because during the mid-cretaceous when Santos Lucas was a large sea levels were much higher which made the Sahara a tropical wetland it would have had many rivers and lakes throughout the land which served as a home for giant fish and a water source for many large herbivorous dinosaurs which would seem like the perfect habitat for a giant crocodile there was another species of sarcosuchus discovered in Northeast Brazil as well called sarcosuchus hearty that was also massive although probably slightly smaller than his African relative this is because during the mid-cretaceous South America and Africa were connected creating one large continent and this ecosystem partially spanned both continents the habitat of Spinosaurus would have been very similar to this ecosystem however 20 million years later when South America had separated from Africa in fact one of Spinosaurus is smaller and more ancient relatives suka - would have lived alongside soccer circus soccer circus will probably widespread in this ancient watery ecosystem since so many of their remains have been found here having so many large crocodiles in one ecosystem makes you wonder what they would have eaten and it is tempting to conclude they're similar to how Nile crocodiles feed on large herbivores like wildebeest and zebra as sarcosuchus ate the large herbivores of the time the dinosaurs the most common herbivorous dinosaur in this ecosystem it was the elephant sized Iguanodon relative lured asaurus this dinosaur was an ornithopod so would have been on the smaller side for herbivorous dinosaur and therefore a more likely candidate for soccer circuses prey if it did hunt dinosaurs lair de Soros has also been put forward by quite a few scientists as a possible aquatic dinosaur it had unusual proportions for an Iguanodon relative and his hands spread out quite widely which is seen in aquatic animals so some researchers think it lived a semi-aquatic lifestyle similar to a hippo this would have meant that it would have spent a lot of its time in close proximity to soccer circus however this could be seen as evidence against a predator-prey relationship between these two animals if nada Soros was semi-aquatic and large numbers of them were swimming around soccer asuka's daily this could indicate that they did not need to worry about being eaten by an aquatic predator too much this can be seen with hippos they spend a lot of their time around Nile crocodiles because adult hippos are too big to be threatened by them however hippo calves are commonly fed upon by large crocodiles and this may have been the same with soccer circus they may not have hunted adult learner Soros who would occasionally try and hunt juveniles this part of the world also had a sauropod good Niger Soros there was a miniature sauropod being considerably smaller than a lot of its giant relatives and may have been in the size range that a large crocodile like sarcosuchus could have tackled so if soccer circus was a large dinosaur hunter amazingly it would have been able to eat the sauropods in its habitat one problem with the dinosaur eat a view of soccer circus is that its skull may not have been the correct shape for hunting big game and it may have been better our hunting small animals the crocodile jaw is built for high bite forces and not much else and because of this it has very little maneuverability other than up and down motions and as their jaw is so long they lack the ability to use their for limb claws to pin their prey in place while biting chunks of metal like mammalian carnivores can because of these limitations the way that crocodiles break apart large prey is by deploying what is called a death roll where they bite down on a chunk of their prey and then spin their body to break it off crocodiles also use this to incapacitate in large living prey as well and from observing living crocodilians it seems that this maneuver is very important to them for hunting big animals a study in 2014 looked at models of giant extinct crocodile skulls to see if they were capable of putting off death rolls as well the study found that prerace horas a giant caiman that lived about 20 million years ago and Deinosuchus were most likely capable of pulling off death rolls they're victims but the soccer circus wasn't if soccer circus was incapable of using death rolls against their prey this would either reduce the size of their prey they could have hunted significantly or meant that they hunted large animals in a different way to modern crocodiles adding to this there is no actual direct evidence of soccer circus eating dinosaurs died no circus was another giant cretaceous crocodile that lived in north america about 40 million years later than soccer circus also it was actually a true crocodile whereas sarcosuchus belonged to a now extinct ancient lineage of crocodiles Deinosuchus was in the alligator family but was a giant being around 10 meters long his skull was much wider and shorter than the skull of Saco circus which meant that it was much better equipped to deal with the stresses that came with a death roll adding to this there is actually some evidence of Deinosuchus eating dinosaurs bite marks have been found on the tail vertebrae of herbivorous dinosaurs from the same region as Deinosuchus that most closely resemble the teeth of the monster croc these findings mean that it is likely that Deinosuchus was the true giant dinosaur crushing croc that psycho circus is often envisioned as because soccer circuses jaw does not seem to be that well-suited for eating large animals some scientists have argued that it may have primarily eaten fish it's long jaw and large bulla on their nostrils is more like the Pacific Geary Owl than the wide and short snout of other crocodiles many species of crocodiles like Nile crocodiles that don't even have these jaws specializations are still capable of catching fish on occasion so sarcosuchus surely would have been capable furthermore Gary ELLs themselves are actually one of the largest species of crocodile alive today and have a family member known as grupo su cos that was also another giant 10 metre crocodile that lived several million years ago and was almost certainly precipitous like it's smaller relative which shows that giant crocodiles can definitely be supported on a fish diet although they were around the same length sarcosuchus did have a considerably larger bill that linked grip asuka's though that suggests their lifestyles weren't exactly the same the freshwater habitats that psycho sook has lived in had many species of giant fish like more Sonia a three meter long coelacanth and near Cretaceous africanus a one meter long long fish so maybe sarcosuchus specialized feeding on larger fish or more likely sonic asuka's descended from fish eaters but then evolved to eat a more generalized diet sarcosuchus is closest relatives vest asuka-san della circus both had elongated skulls with even more features that you would expect to see for a fish eater so snark asuka's may have eaten a generalized diet including fish and small dinosaurs and just had an elongated jaw because of its ancestry this is seen in the modern day false carry out that looks similar to the gharial but the snout broadened significantly towards the base similar to sarcosuchus the false Garry out looks like a Gary oh that actually has quite a varied diet eating fish but also many other types of prey including some fairly big animals like monkeys and sarcosuchus may have been similar just scaled up five times so these giant crocodiles would have been common in these ancient African wetlands and probably had a varied diet consisting of fish and perhaps smaller dinosaurs but they all disappeared around a hundred and ten million years ago although it isn't exactly known why psycho suitors went extinct it was probably due to climate change although large predators lord over their ecosystems they are usually the most reliant animal on the ecosystem being healthy because they need such an abundance of food to survive however soccer asuka's was not the last giant crocodile as they evolved again later in the Cretaceous and the giant croc riposte suka survived into this little as ten thousand years ago thank you so much for watching and thanks to all my patrons for supporting the channel especially the big contributors like Sami Vaz Green fours grim Marshall Brandon clop Ken Ham and night runner if you enjoy content like this then consider 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Channel: Moth Light Media

Views: 156,419

Rating: 4.9587936 out of 5

Keywords: Giant croc, Giant Crocodile, Giant Crcodilian, Sarcosuchus, Dienosuchus, Gryposuchus, Large Crcodiles, Dinosaurs, African Dinosuars, When sahara was green, Dinosaur Eating Crocodile, Nigersaurus, Lurdusaurs, Aquatic Dinosaurs, African Crcodile, Evolution, Cretaceous, Croc, Alligators, Crocodilian, Crocodile

Id: i1PPBVJahsY

Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2020