Saturday, August 04, 2007

Croc Update

Sure it's a croc, not a gator, but they've already made this movie.

Salt Lake Tribune - Fossil of huge prehistoric croc found on Grand Staircase: "KANAB - You could call Utah's latest dinosaur discovery the big chomp. But you wouldn't dare call it the big chump.

This 30-foot-long super-crocodile - packing a snout full of jagged 5-inch teeth - rivaled a T-rex when it cruised prehistoric waterways, snacking on 10-foot sturgeons and devouring large land-dwelling dinosaurs that ventured near the shores for a drink.

'The fish were like a sushi appetizer to tide it over before the steak,' said Alan Titus, the paleontologist for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. 'It was just as big as Tyrannosaurus but lived in water.'

At an announcement here Friday, Titus said he discovered about a quarter of the creature's upper snout in the fossil-rich area of the Kaiparowits Plateau in Kane County in late June.

He said preliminary inspection indicates that not only does the 75.5-million-year-old fossil fragment represent a new species, it also may require a whole new genus to categorize it. "

2 comments:

Randy Johnson said...

Hate to run up on him in a dark alley.

mybillcrider said...

Or even a well-lighted alley.