Ancient North American Crocodylomorph Nicknamed the Carolina Butcher

Posted on March 22, 2015

The fossil of an ancient land-dwelling crocodylomorph has been discovered in the Pekin Formation in Chatham County, North Carolina. The ancient crocodile ancestor would have been one of the top predators in North America during the time period before the dinosaurs. It was nine feet long and walked on its hind legs.

The species has been named Carnufex carolinensis or the Carolina Butcher. PBS Newshour reports that the Butcher name comes from the creature's knife-shaped skull and blade-like teeth. Researchers from North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences recovered parts of Carnufex's skull, spine and upper forelimb. The skull was in pieces but researchers scanned each piece with a high-resolution surface scanner and used the scans to build a three-dimensional model of the reconstructed skull. An image of the reconstructed skull is pictured below.

Lindsay Zanno, assistant research professor at NC State, says in a statement, "Fossils from this time period are extremely important to scientists because they record the earliest appearance of crocodylomorphs and theropod dinosaurs, two groups that first evolved in the Triassic period, yet managed to survive to the present day in the form of crocodiles and birds, The discovery of Carnufex, one of the world's earliest and largest crocodylomorphs, adds new information to the push and pull of top terrestrial predators across Pangea."

The researchers say Carnufex fed on small armored reptiles and early mammal relatives. A research paper on the early crocodylomorph can be found here in the journal, Scientific Reports.

ANIMALS