Felipe Elias
Sphagesaurus: a land crocodile that lived between 65 and 80 million years agoFelipe EliasThe ancestors of crocodiles were nothing like those of today that spend a good part of the time lying still in the water and crawl when they venture onto dry land. Sphagesaurus montealtensis, or the butcher reptile from Monte Alto, lived out of the water and walked with his belly far off the ground. According to an article published in June in Historical Biology, it is possible that it was the butcher as its name suggests, but it was not satisfied with meat only: the molar-shaped teeth indicate that its diet included vegetable matter. “Whatever its diet it had difficulty digesting any food that needed to be chewed before it was swallowed”, explains Marco Brandalise de Andrade, who studied the fossils loaned by the Paleontology Museum of Monte Alto during his Masters degree at the Paulista State University (Unesp) in Rio Claro. The species, S. montealtensis lived between 65 and 80 million years ago where up-state Sao Paulo is today and joins seven other already described crocodilians that lived in the region at this time, a diversity that suggests that there were more crocodilians than dinosaurs in Brazil.
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