Croc Teeth Views
O'Connor and his colleagues analysed the anatomy of the teeth and jaw of the best-preserved fossil found so far, in the Rukwa Rift Basin in Tanzania1. The specimen had a short, broad, cat-like skull — hence the genus name, as paka is the local Kiswahili language word for 'cat' — but the skull bone arrangement is otherwise distinctively crocodilian.
They used microcomputed tomography to construct three-dimensional images of the skull and to show how the jaws would have moved in the living animal. This revealed that the teeth had developed into forms strikingly similar to those seen in modern mammals — and very different from the simple conical pegs found in all crocodiles and alligators today. In particular, there were molar-like teeth that met together, providing two parallel shearing edges to slice food, just like those of a modern carnivore.
O'Connor is correct in saying that this is a croc trying hard to be a mammal, comments palaeontologist Greg Buckley of Roosevelt University in Schaumburg, Illinois. If only isolated teeth had been discovered, without the skull, it is very likely that some of the molariform teeth would have been mistaken for a mammal's. This is truly an exciting discovery and helps to fill in more of the missing pieces of our understanding of these often overlooked creatures.
Croc Teeth Images
