From Buckley et al (2000):

Although the image of crocodyliforms as 'unchanged living fossils' is naive, several morphological features of the group are thought to have varied only within narrow limits during the course of evolution. These include an elongate snout with an array of conical teeth, a dorsoventrally flattened skull and a posteriorly positioned jaw articulation, which provides a powerful bite force. Here we report an exquisitely preserved specimen of a new taxon from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar that deviates profoundly from this Bauplan, possessing an extremely blunt snout, a tall, rounded skull, an anteriorly shifted jaw joint and clove-shaped, multicusped teeth reminiscent of those of some ornithischian dinosaurs. This last feature implies that the diet of the new taxon may have been predominantly if not exclusively herbivorous. A close relationship with notosuchid crocodyliforms, particularly Uruguaysuchus (Late Cretaceous, Uruguay) is suggested by several shared derived features; this supports a biogeographical hypothesis that Madagascar and South America were linked during the Late Cretaceous.

This skull (UA 8679) was discovered by L. L. Randriamiaramanana, southeast of the village Berivota, Mahajanga Basin, in northwestern Madagascar; Maevarano Formation, Upper Cretaceous. It was made available to the University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray CT Facility for scanning by Dr. David Krause of the Department of Anatomical Sciences, State University of New York at Stony Brook.

The specimen was scanned by Matthew Colbert on 13 August 2003 along the coronal axis for a total of 999 slices, each slice 0.131 mm thick with an interslice spacing of 0.131 mm.

Literature

Buckley, G. A., C. A. Brochu, D. W. Krause, and D. Pol. 2000. A pug-nosed crocodyliform from the late Cretaceous of Madagascar. Nature 405:941-944.

None available.