Tyrannoneustes lythrodectikos or ‘tyrant swimmer’, a marine crocodile that looked part shark and part sinister dolphin, has been identified as one of the world’s oldest-known “super predators”, meaning carnivores that can feed on prey that’s as large or larger than themselves.
“It is the oldest-known metriorhynchid macrophage- an animal that was adapted to feeding on large-bodied prey,” says Mark Young of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Biological Sciences. The term ‘metriorhynchid’ refers to a group of marine crocodiles that were superficially similar to living dolphins. “During the Middle Callovian Age 165 million years ago, much of Europe was covered by a shallow sea, creating a chain of large to small islands. Tyrannoneustes lived in this shallow sea, along with numerous other marine reptiles.”
Tyrannoneustes was first discovered in the late 1800s in the Oxford Clay Formation, which is a Jurassic soil sediment found by England and originally thought to have been a close relative called Dakosaurus. It was locked away in the storage system in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, and remained hidden there collecting dust and untouched for over a century. It was finally taken out and re-examined in early 2013 (January) by Mark Young and some of his colleagues and found to be a whole new, largest, and oldest species of marine crocodile.
Credit : Dinopedia
Picture Credit : Google
