Stomatosuchus
| Stomatosuchus | ||||||||||||
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Live reconstruction of a stomatosuchus inermis with a throat pouch. However, such a feature could not be proven on the basis of fossils of closely related species ( Laganosuchus ) and is purely speculative. |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Cenomanium (Upper Cretaceous ) | ||||||||||||
| 99.6 to 93.6 million years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Stomatosuchus | ||||||||||||
| Stromer , 1925 |
Stomatosuchus is an extinct, Cretaceous genus of very large, close relatives of modern crocodiles with an unusually shaped skull. The fossil remains, a single, very large skull and some cervical vertebrae , came from the Bahariya formation in the eastern Sahara of Egypt . These fossils, the type material of the onlyspecies Stomatosuchus inermis describedby the German palaeontologist Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach in1925, were destroyed in the Second World War , in the spring of 1944, during an Allied bombing raidon Munich . No further material has been found since then. Therefore, Stomatosuchus is only known today through the publications and notes by Stromer and Nopcsa .
features
The flattened skull was almost two meters long, one of which resembles a duckbill snout about 4 / 5 occupied. The lower jaw, shaped like an elongated "U", was extremely slender and about 30 times as long as it was high. With the exception of the anterior parts near the symphysis , the two branches of the mandible ran parallel. The oval tooth sockets in the upper jaw had a maximum length of 1.5 cm. No teeth have survived, but the size of the tooth sockets suggests that they must have been very small compared to the length of the skull. Towards the rear end of the jaw branches, the tooth sockets became increasingly smaller and closer and finally merged into a channel. The eyes were high up, relatively close together on the head. The total length of the animal, to which the skull discovered and described by Stromer belonged, is estimated to be up to 10 meters.
behavior
Because of its fragile jaw, Stomatosuchus is unlikely to have been able to develop as strong a bite force as today's crocodiles. The small size of the teeth also suggests that it must have been feeding on prey that was significantly smaller than itself. It probably ate relatively small fish by lurking in shallow water with its mouth open and snapping careless fish swimming too close to his open mouth.
Later, in the Miocene , the South American caimans ( Mourasuchus and relatives) developed a very similar way of life, completely independent of Stomatosuchus .
Systematics
Stomatosuchus is the type genus of the Stomatosuchidae family to which, according to the current definition, Laganosuchus from the Cenomaniac of the western part of the Sahara (Niger, Morocco) belongs.
literature
- Paul C. Sereno , Hans CE Larsson: Cretaceous crocodyliforms from the Sahara. ZooKeys. No. 28 (special edition), 2009, doi : 10.3897 / zookeys.28.325 .
