‘Oddball’ crocs
Posted on | November 20, 2009 | No Comments
From National Geographic: Built to move on land, DuckCroc may have been quick-witted, as well as quick on its feet. Scans of DuckCroc's brain shows it surrounded by air pockets — signs that it was a turbocharged organ in need of cooling. DogCroc also shared similar characteristics. You might call them the corvettes of crocodiles. But DuckCroc had an even bigger fore brain that was connected to a very specialized nose - perhaps something like a duck-billed platypus.
Amphibian lovers, set your TiVos. National Geographic is set to unveil a new group of “oddball” crocs at 9pm, Saturday November 21st in “When Crocs Ate Dinosaurs.”
“There’s an entire croc world brewing in Africa that we really had only an inkling about before,” Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, told National Geographic News. “We knew about SuperCroc, the titan of all crocs, but we didn’t have quite an idea of what existed in the shadows,” he said. According to the report, now they have found three new species nicknamed PancakeCroc, BoarCroc and RatCroc and new skeletons of DuckCroc and DogCroc. “We have crocs here that ate plants and galloped and ate dinosaurs and were flat as a board,” Sereno told National Geographic News.
For a photo gallery of the crocs, click here.
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