Crocodiles: Colossal Predators Eons Ago

The crocodile was a silent stalker, as long as a school bus and weighing almost 18,000 pounds. It cruised the primeval rivers of what is now Saharan Africa, looking for unwary dinosaurs to snatch and grab.

“It was absolutely enormous,” said University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno. “There’s nothing that would be able to handle that animal. It’s like a torpedo of muscle 5 feet in diameter. The skull of the world’s largest living crocodile looks like an hors d’oeuvre by comparison.”

Sarcosuchus imperator, or “flesh-eating crocodile emperor,” lived 110 million years ago, and in an age of giants, this ancient crocodile was a top-of-the-food-chain predator with 4-foot jaws. It could gobble fish 12 feet long and probably scooted ashore to bring down dinosaurs weighing tons.

Reporting in the journal Science’s Web site, the Sereno-led team of paleontologists for the first time described the size and habits of this beast, whose remains were found in central Africa’s bone-dry Tenere Desert in an area of Niger called Gadoufaou.

What they found was an animal easily recognizable as a crocodile but almost unimaginably larger than any modern-day descendant. Sarcosuchus was 37 to 40 feet long, with a 5 1/2-foot-long head. It weighed at least 17,600 pounds--about 1.5 times as much as an African elephant.

By contrast, the largest Australian crocodiles are no more than 21 feet long and weigh a bit more than a ton. American alligators, the most familiar species in North America, can grow to 15 feet and weigh up to 1,300 pounds.

The giant reptile lived during the Cretaceous Period, a time of global warming when vegetation was lush enough to support large numbers of enormous creatures.