Reconstruction of Carnufex carolinensis (Jorge Gonzales)
This week's CBC Quicks & Quarks has a couple of segments on giant creatures from the past.
The first is about a super-sized salamander from the Triassic (about 230 million years ago) of Portugal. The interview is with Dr. Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist from the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He describes a 2 meter long creature that spent most of it's time in the water. There is evidence that it came on land to feast on small dinosaurs and mammals that ventured too close to the water's edge. This giant animal was one of the many victims of the mass extinction caused by the break-up of Pangea. Here is the original paper from The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The next segment is about a giant prehistoric crocodile, referred to as a "Carolina Butcher". This fossil is of an ancestor of modern crocodile (Carnufex carolinensis). It was discovered in North Carolina and is about 231 million years old (Triassic). The bones included skull, spine, and forelimbs. The juvenile specimen appears able to walk on it's hind legs and would have been nearly 3 meters long. It also did not survive past the Triassic mass extinction. Here is the original paper in the journal Nature's Scientific Reports.
