Ancient super crocodile fossil found in museum drawer

Long-forgotten remains of a long-forgotten species, have been discovered in a museum drawer in Scotland. The beast, a dolphin-shaped crocodilian "super predator," was able to eat other species its size and larger.

The ancient newfound crocodilian is named Tyrannoneustes lythrodectikos, Greek for "blood-biting tyrant swimmer." Sounds pretty friendly, doesn't it? "Tyrannoneustes was a dolphinlike crocodile that lived 165 million years ago," said researcher Mark Young, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the University of Southampton in England.

The predator possessed a long snout, large flippers, armorless skin and a tail fin where the bottom half is larger than the top half, resembling an upside-down version of an ordinary shark's tail fin.It's uncertain how large Tyrannoneustes was, but the right side of its lower jaw was at least 26 inches (67 centimeters) long. It featured enlarged teeth with serrated edges, and a jaw that evolved to open wider, allowing it to swallow smaller prey whole.
Back when Tyrannoneustes was alive, the area in central England where the fossils were discovered was covered in a shallow sea encompassing much of what is now Europe. Originally found between 1907 and 1909, the fossil has been lost in a drawer at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow for nearly 100 years.

There are no modern descendents of the animal. Instead, this predator was a kind of metriorhynchid, an extinct family of marine crocodiles.

The discovery of Tyrannoneustes shows that during the Middle Jurassic, metriorhynchid crocodiles were beginning to evolve into predators of large-bodied prey. By the Late Jurassic, numerous metriorhynchid species were suited to feeding on large prey, but Tyrannoneustes is the first known from the Middle Jurassic. How this impacted upon other predatory groups such as pliosaurs and ichthyosaurs is still unclear.
 

Future research can scan Tyrannoneustes bones to develop computer models of how it might have fed, Young said. He and his colleagues detailed their findings online Jan. 4 in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.

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Godzillus fossil find stumps experts

A fossilized specimen, a roughly elliptical shape with multiple lobes, totaling almost seven feet in length, was unveiled today at the North-Central Section 46th Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America, in Dayton, Ohio.
Animal, vegetable, or mineral? Experts are trying to figure out what a fossil dubbed "Godzillus" used to be.

It does sort of just look like a rock-colored lump, but paleontologists affiliated with the University of Cincinnati say that they've found something very big and very weird. The 150-pound fossil recovered last year in northern Kentucky is more than 6 feet long and 3 feet wide. To the untrained eye, it looks like a bunch of rocks or a concrete blob.
Characteristics other than size also set this find apart from previous discoveries. It has an unusual texture, created by a directional pattern on its surface. It was also found with small animal fossils attached to it. These small animals, known as trilobites, may provide clues necessary for the fossil's eventual identification.


Experts are trying to determine whether it was an animal, mineral or a form of plant life from a time when the Cincinnati region was underwater.

Around 450 million years ago, shallow seas covered the Cincinnati region and harbored one very large and now very mysterious organism. Despite its size, no one has ever found a fossil of this "monster" until its discovery by an citizen paleontologist, Ron Fine of Dayton, last year.

Like Godzilla, it's a primordial beast that found its way to the modern era. Now 43, he's been collecting fossils since age 4, and said he saw part of this one on a hillside off Kentucky 17 nearly a year ago.
Most fossils around here are small, the size of your thumbnail or your thumb. This thing's huge.

Ron Fine is a member of the Dry Dredgers, a 70-year-old association of amateur paleontologists based at the University of Cincinnati. "I knew right away that I had found an unusual fossil. Imagine a saguaro cactus with flattened branches and horizontal stripes in place of the usual vertical stripes. That's the best description I can give." 

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Megalodon - the Biggest Shark

Megalodon was an ancient shark that may have been 40 feet (12 m) long or even more. (There are a few scientists who estimate that it could have been up to 50 or 100 feet (15.5 or 31 m) long!), who lived from roughly 25 to 1.6 million years ago, during the Miocene and Pliocene epochs. It is now extinct, but the exact time of its extinction is hotly debated. Not only was Megalodon the biggest prehistoric shark that ever lived; it was the biggest predatory marine creature in the history of the planet, outweighing both modern Great White Sharks and Liopleurodon or Kronosaurus.

Shark fossils are extremely rare because sharks have no bones, only cartilage, which does not fossilize well. Their teeth, however, are very hard, and made of a bone-like material coated with hard enamel and they fossilize very well. Megalodon teeth are similar to those of the Great White Shark, but are much bigger, thicker, and with finer serrrations. Megalodon's jaws could open 6 feet (1.8 m) wide and 7 feet (2.1 m) high. The jaws were loosely attached by ligaments and muscles to the skull, opening extremely wide in order to swallow enormous objects. It could easily swallow a large Great White Shark whole! 

Like most sharks, Megalodon's teeth were probably located in rows which rotated into use as they were needed. Most sharks have about 3-5 rows of teeth at any time. The front set does most of the work. The first two rows are used for obtaining prey, the other rows rotate into place as they are needed. As teeth are lost, broken, or worn down, they are replaced by new teeth. Megalodon may have had hundreds of teeth at one time. It did not chew their food like we do, but gulped it down whole in very large chunks.
Unlike some marine predators of prehistoric times--which were restricted to the coastlines or inland rivers and lakes of certain continents--Megalodon had a truly global distribution, terrorizing whales in warm-water oceans all over the world. Apparently, the only thing keeping adult Megalodons from venturing too far toward solid land was their enormous size, which would have beached them as helplessly as 16th-century Spanish galleons.

So Megalodon was huge, relentless, and the apex predator of the Pliocene and Miocene epochs. What went wrong? Well, there's no lack of theories: Megalodon may have been doomed by global cooling (which culminated in the last Ice Age), or by the gradual disappearance of the giant whales that constituted the bulk of its diet. (By the way, some people think Megalodons still lurk in the ocean's depths, but there's absolutely no evidence to support this.)

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