IS IT a fish? Is it a dinosaur? No 鈥� it鈥檚 an ancient cousin of the crocodile, nicknamed 鈥淕odzilla鈥�.
Until recently, Dakosaurus andiniensis was known only from fragmentary bones. But now a fossil discovered in western Argentina suggests it was a 4-metre-long creature living 135 million years ago, with the massive skull of a predatory dinosaur and the tail of a fish. 鈥淚t鈥檚 certainly the most bizarre of all marine crocs,鈥� says Diego Pol of Ohio State University, who was in the team that discovered the fossil.
Strictly speaking, Dakosaurus was a crocodyliform and not a true crocodile. The group evolved about the same time as the first dinosaurs, and initially lived on land. Then, 200 to 145 million years ago, some evolved to resemble modern crocodiles and moved into the oceans.
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The skull discovered by Zulma Gasparini of the National University of La Plata in Argentina and his colleagues is stunningly different from a previous species of Dakosaurus discovered in Europe and other marine crocodyliforms, they report in Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1120803). Instead of a flat head with a long thin snout, D. andiniensis had a head about 30 centimetres high, and a short, stout snout with powerful serrated cutting teeth like those of predatory dinosaurs.
