Was this croc a landlubber?
Following many months of meticulous work by technicians, the Kostensuchus atrox bones finally emerged from the rocks.
“It’s a very slow process of discovery,” filled with drama and tension, says Pol. “I love that part, because more and more surprises appear every day in the lab.”
Once finished, the team had also uncovered its neck, back, hip bones, ribs, and parts of a forelimb. Missing were the tail and most of the hindlimbs. Compared to modern crocs, Kostensuchus had a longer forelimb, hinting that it may have held itself upright and walked on land rather than spent most of its time in the water.
Eric Willberg, a vertebrate paleontologist from Stony Brook University in New York who wasn’t part of the team, says the terrestrial evidence is mixed. The croc’s pelvis, he says, suggests the hindlimb may have sprawled outward, like modern crocodiles, rather than fully upright like in mammals and other extinct terrestrial crocodyliforms.
The forelimb traits could alternatively reflect an adaptation for seizing and tearing prey rather than for moving around, Pol and his colleagues acknowledge. But without the hindlimb bones it’s hard to reconstruct how it moved and subdued its prey, notes Adam Cossette, a vertebrate paleontologist at the New York Institute of Technology.
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