Real-Life DinoCrocs Crushed the Competition
In 1998 news sources heralded the discovery of Suchomimus - the dinosaurian “crocodile mimic.” One of the bizarre spinosaurs, this fish-eating predator had a long, low skull full of conical teeth vastly different from the deep, knife-toothed skulls of other large predators like Tyrannosaurus, Allosaurus, and Ceratosaurus. So unusual was this dinosaur that it seems to have been the inspiration for two bare-bones b-movies - DinoCroc, and, of course, DinoCroc versus SuperGator. What few people know, however, is that one group of crocs also imitated fearsome dinosaurian predators.
Paleontologists Douglas Riff and Alexander Kellner described the characteristics of the true dinocrocs in a paper recently published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. In particular, they focused on a complete specimen of the crocodyliform Stratiosuchus maxhechti from the approximately 90 to 83 million year old strata of Brazil. This creature was unlike any croc alive today.