Dinosaur remains found in 95-million-year-old skeleton of newly discovered crocodile: ‘His last meal’ | Abroad

This reports Sky News† The fossilized remains of the crocodile, dubbed Confractosuchus sauroktonos, were found on a large sheep-raising estate in Queensland. It is believed that these remains are more than 95 million years old.

While the researchers were busy stitching together the crocodile’s remains, they found skeletal remains of a small juvenile ornithopod dinosaur in its stomach. According to the scientists, this is the first evidence that crocodiles ate dinosaurs in Australia.

‘Extremely rare’

“The discovery of a small juvenile ornithopod in the gut of a fossilized crocodile is extremely rare, as there are only a handful of examples worldwide of animals that ate dinosaurs,” says the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum. Sky News.

The fossil was first discovered and excavated by museum staff and volunteers in 2010. But the bones were extremely fragile and too densely packed into a chunk of rock to be removed. Therefore, a special technique had to be used to find out exactly where the bones in the rock were located. This has taken years.

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The bones of the dinosaur were also found among the bones of the crocodile. This suggests that the crocodile either killed the animal immediately or captured it soon after death, according to the scientists. One of the ornithopod’s femurs had been torn in half, and the other femur had been bitten so hard that it left a tooth mark in the bone.

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