The final meal of an ancient crocodile that lived around 95 million years ago has been revealed to be a dinosaur.
The fossilised bones of the crocodile, official name Confractosuchus sauroktonos, were found with the remains of a young dinosaur inside its stomach, according to the Daily Mail.
Naturally, this ancient dinosaur-eating predator was discovered in Australia, proving it to be a land cursed to be roamed by terrifying monsters for eternity.
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More specifically, the fossils of the ancient crocodile and the dinosaur it gobbled up for its final meal were found in a sheep station near a geological deposit in Queensland.
According to experts, our ancient Confractosuchus sauroktonos friend would have been about 8.5 feet long and eaten meat to survive, which at the time it was hanging around Australia would have meant dinosaur meat was on the menu.
The fossil shows the croc was still a young creature and growing at the time it died, with experts speculating it either killed the dinosaur itself or found it dead and decided to get munching.
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Meanwhile, the small dinosaur it snacked on was an ornithopod, a type of two-legged herbivorous dinosaur which had the misfortune to venture too close to a big crocodile in the mood for a snack.
It's possible that the crocodile nabbed the little ornithopod because it was an 'easy meal', but it does help prove a link to crocodiles preying on dinosaurs when the two species lived side by side.
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'The discovery of a small juvenile ornithopod in the gut contents of a Cretaceous-aged crocodile is extremely rare, as only a handful of examples of dinosaur predation are known globally,' the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum said.
People aren't always aware that dinosaurs and crocodiles lived together in very imperfect harmony for millions of years, or that not much has changed for crocodiles and alligators since the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
It would seem that there's very little for nature to improve upon when it comes to crocodiles, as they have a very slow evolutionary rate and are still pretty much doing the same thing they've been doing for millions of years.
The Independent notes they are very resilient animals that managed to survive the asteroid strike which eventually wiped out the dinosaurs, due in no small part to their ability to go for long periods of time without food.
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Topics: Animals
Joe Harker