a new discovery Turnersuchus hingleyae It is the result of a remarkable excavation of fossils on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, UK, that includes a partial head, spine and limbs. So productive were these excavations in the Charmouth Mudstone Formation that Turnersuchus It is the only thalatosuchian of its age – dated to the Early Jurassic Plinsbachian period, about 185 million years ago – named with sufficient completeness to date.
Posted in refereed Journal of Vertebrate PaleontologyExperts say the discovery of this new predator helps fill a gap in the fossil record, suggesting that thalatosuchus must have emerged, along with other crocodiles, around 15 million years ago, in the late Triassic period. years further than you lived in time Turnersuh.
“We should now expect to find more Thalattosuchians the same age as him. TurnersuchusA professor of anatomical sciences at Stony Brook University, co-author Dr. “And old people,” says Eric Wilberg.
“Actually, at the time our article was published, another article was published describing a Talatosuchia skull from the Gettanian/Sinemurian period (pre-Plinsbach era) found on the roof of a cave in Morocco. gym), confirms this idea. I hope we continue to find more ancient Talatozuchis and their relatives. Our analyzes suggest that thalatosuchians probably first appeared in the Triassic and experienced a mass extinction at the end of the Triassic.”
However, no excavations have found thalattosuchians in Triassic rocks, meaning that there was a ghost lineage (a period when we knew the group must have existed but have yet to find fossils). before opening Turnersuchus This ghost lineage spanned from the late Triassic to the Jurassic Toarian period, “but we can now shorten the ghost lineage by several million years,” the panel of experts said.
Thalattosuchians are colloquially known as “sea crocodiles” or “sea crocodiles”, although they do not belong to Crocodylia but are more distant relatives. Some thalattosuchians are well adapted to life in the oceans, with short limbs transformed into fins, a shark-like tail fin, salt glands, and the potential to give birth to live babies (rather than laying eggs).
Turnersuchus It is interesting that many of these known features of thalatosuchia are not yet fully developed. It lived in the Jurassic Ocean and hunted marine wildlife. With its relatively long, slender snout, it resembled the living gharial crocodiles found in all the major river systems of the northern Indian subcontinent.
From the University of São Paulo in Brazil, co-author Dr. “However,” says Pedro Godoy, “unlike crocodiles, this nearly two-metre long predator lived only in coastal marine environments. And although the skulls were outwardly similar to modern gharials, they were built quite differently.”
Thalatosuchians had large supratemporal windows, specifically the area of the skull where the jaw muscles were located. This shows that Turnersuchus and other thalattozoans likely had enlarged jaw muscles that allowed them to bite quickly; most of their possible prey were fast-moving fish or cephalopods. As with modern crocodiles, the temporal region of Turnersuchus Small thermoregulatory function – helped maintain brain temperature.
Source: Port Altele
