Scientists uncover ‘bizarre’ Australian crocodile species that jumped from timber to hunt hundreds of thousands of years in the past | EUROtoday

Researchers have found Australia’s oldest-known crocodile eggshells belonging to a “bizarre” reptile that hunted from timber some 55 million years in the past.

This was epochs earlier than fashionable saltwater and freshwater species arrived on the continent.

Researchers have been finishing up excavations for many years at a clay pit in a grazier’s yard within the Queensland city of Murgon, providing a window again in time to when the continent was nonetheless linked to Antarctica and South America.

Now, they’ve uncovered the oldest crocodilian eggshells ever present in Australia. They belong to a wierd “mekosuchine” clade of extinct crocodiles that dominated inland waters 55 million years in the past, in accordance with a brand new examine revealed within the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

It has been named Wakkaoolithus godthelpi after the Wakka Wakka First Nations individuals on whose nation the fossils had been discovered.

Some of those crocodiles grew as much as 5 metres lengthy. “It’s a bizarre idea. But some of them appear to have been terrestrial hunters in the forests,” palaeontologist Michael Archer from the University of New South Wales, one of many authors of the brand new examine, mentioned. “Some were also apparently at least partly semi-arboreal ‘drop crocs’. They were perhaps hunting like leopards – dropping out of trees on any unsuspecting thing they fancied for dinner.”

Researchers mentioned the extinct crocodiles laid eggs on the margins of lakes and tailored their reproductive technique to fluctuating circumstances. They finally needed to adapt to shrinking waterways and dwindling numbers of their large-sized prey.

Further excavations on the web site might present extra insights into Australia’s prehistoric ecosystems earlier than it grew to become an unbiased continent, the researchers mentioned.

“This forest was also home to the world’s oldest-known songbirds, Australia’s earliest frogs and snakes, a wide range of small mammals with South American links, as well as one of the world’s oldest known bats,” Michael Stein, one other creator of the examine, mentioned.

Study lead creator Xavier Panadès i Blas mentioned the newest analysis confirmed how highly effective learning eggshell fragments might be.

“Eggshells should be a routine, standard component of palaeontological research,” he mentioned, “collected, curated and analysed alongside bones and teeth.”

“They preserve microstructural and geochemical signals that tell us not only what kinds of animals laid them,” he defined, that means eggshells, “but also where they nested and how they bred.”