The “Carolina butcher” has been found and is just as scary as the name suggests.
Scientists on Thursday said that they had unearthed fossils in North Carolina of a large, land-dwelling crocodile that lived about 231 million years ago, walked on its hind legs and was a top land predator right before the first dinosaurs appeared.
Transported back to the Triassic Period, what would a person experience upon encountering this agile, about 3m-long, 1.5m-tall beast with a long skull and blade-like teeth?
“Abject terror,” said North Carolina State University paleontologist Lindsay Zanno, who led the research published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“Climb up the nearest tree,” North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences paleontologist Vince Schneider advised.
The creature is named Carnufex carolinensis, meaning “Carolina butcher,” for its menacing features.
It was a very early member of the croc lineage and was unlike today’s crocs.
It was not aquatic and not a quadruped, instead prowling on two legs in the warm equatorial region that North Carolina was at the time.
It lived alongside armored plant-eating reptiles known as aetosaurs, early mammal relatives and other fierce predators, which included the large, long-snouted, water-dwelling, four-legged phytosaurs.
Carnufex is one of the most primitive members of the broad category of reptiles called crocodylomorphs, encompassing the various forms of crocs that have appeared on Earth.
“As one of the earliest and oldest crocodylomorphs, Carnufex was a far cry from living crocodiles. It was an agile, terrestrial predator that hunted on land,” Zanno said. “Carnufex predates the group that living crocodiles belong to.”
The scientists unearthed portions of Carnufex’s skull, spine and forelimb parts from a Chatham County quarry.
They also created a three-dimensional model of the skull, filling in the missing parts with the more complete skulls of close relatives.
Carnufex lived just before the appearance of the first dinosaurs, which started as modest creatures in the Triassic before becoming Earth’s dominant land animals.
Zanno said Carnufex’s discovery underscores the notion that before dinosaurs became well-established in North America, such crocs and their cousins filled the large predator roles.
While the dinosaur lineage eventually produced the world’s largest terrestrial predators, it was the crocs and their cousins that typically were the Triassic tough guys.
A group related to crocs called rauisuchians included large four-legged land predators up to 8m in length or more.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS