Found 95 million-year-old fossils of 'terrible' crocodiles that eat dinosaurs

Australian scientists have found fossils of a new species of crocodile that still has its last meal in its stomach, the carcass of ornithopods.

Dr. White and the Broken Dinosaur Killer crocodile fossil.

Crocodile fossils nicknamed Broken Dinosaur Killer were collected from a sheep farm in suburban Queensland, estimated to be more than 95 million years old. The researchers said that when assembling the fossilized bones of the crocodile, they suddenly discovered a young ornithopod carcass in its belly. According to researcher Matt White from the Museum of the Age of Dinosaurs in Australia, they first encountered a dinosaur carcass in the stomach of a crocodile.

The fossil was first discovered by a team of paleontologists near Winton in 2010 and took more than six years to put together. This is the first ornithopod skeleton in the region and the first evidence that crocodiles ate dinosaurs in Australia. The prehistoric crocodile and its last meal will continue to provide evidence of the relationships and behavior of animals that inhabited Australia millions of years ago.

The discovery also reveals that dinosaurs were an important part of the Cretaceous food web. Dinosaurs are not at the top of the food chain but are part of a complex web of mammals, pterosaurs, birds and crocodiles. Through fossils, it can be seen that crocodiles are ready to eat anything that comes close to them.

Ornithopods, small herbivores with sharp beaks full of sharp teeth, lived on Earth more than 100 million years ago. They may be only slightly larger than a chicken. White and his colleagues speculate that when the dinosaur reached the riverbank, the crocodile jumped up and attacked it.

Alligator fossils are too brittle to separate from the soil by conventional methods, so the researchers used new technology to combine X-ray images of the fossils. White then uses the scanned image data to digitally prepare the specimen. This process, which can take months, helps to restore a 3D image of the skeleton.