NOOOPE: Here’s A Terrifying Crocodile Relative Known As The “Carolina Butcher”

No. Nope. Nuh-uh. That up there, my friends, is an ancient croc who hunted on its hind legs. It lived 230 million years ago but it will haunt my dreams tonight. Some fun facts about this thing:

• It is known as the Carnufex carolinensis.
• It was three meters long.
• It walked on two legs.
• It roamed around pre-dinosaurs.
• According to the Washington Post it is “one of the oldest and largest crocodile relatives ever known.”

Fossilized spine, skull, and arm bones of this “Carolina Butcher” were found by Lindsay Zanno of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and her team. As The Washington Post’s Rachel Feltman writes:

Its bones may have been found in a quarry, but back in the Butcher’s day North Carolina was a lush, warm, wet region just beginning to pull away from the supercontinent of Pangea. And in that region, it seems, an upright crocodile roamed.

And as the team wrote in Scientific Reports (emphasis ours)

Triassic predatory guild evolution reflects a period of ecological flux spurred by the catastrophic end-Permian mass extinction and terminating with the global ecological dominance of dinosaurs in the early Jurassic. In responding to this dynamic ecospace, terrestrial predator diversity attained new levels, prompting unique trophic webs with a seeming overabundance of carnivorous taxa and the evolution of entirely new predatory clades. Key among these was Crocodylomorpha, the largest living reptiles and only one of two archosaurian lineages that survive to the present day. In contrast to their existing role as top, semi-aquatic predators, the earliest crocodylomorphs were generally small-bodied, terrestrial faunivores, occupying subsidiary (meso) predator roles. Here we describe Carnufex carolinensis a new, unexpectedly large-bodied taxon with a slender and ornamented skull from the Carnian Pekin Formation (~231 Ma), representing one of the oldest and earliest diverging crocodylomorphs described to date. Carnufex bridges a problematic gap in the early evolution of pseudosuchians by spanning key transitions in bauplan evolution and body mass near the origin of Crocodylomorpha. With a skull length of >50 cm, the new taxon documents a rare instance of crocodylomorphs ascending to top-tier predator guilds in the equatorial regions of Pangea prior to the dominance of dinosaurs.

Look all I know is COOL and NOPE.

(via Gizmodo, image via Jorge Gonzales)
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