Lolong's ancestors fought 40-ft snakes over food

Sixty million years ago, crocodiles just about as large as Lolong, the 21-foot seawater crocodile captured in the marshlands of Agusan del Sur, had to battle it out with the world’s biggest snakes which grew 40 feet or even 50 feet in length. But the ancient battle of reptilian titans happened eons ago in what is now present-day Colombia in South America, not in the Philippines in Southeast Asia. In an article published in the journal Paleontology on Thursday (Friday in Manila), University of Florida researchers named the new 20-foot extinct crocodilian species as Acherontisuchus guajiraensis.

Florida Museum of Natural History illustration by Danielle Byerley depicting an A. guajiraensis, a 60-million-year-old ancestor of modern crocodiles, in the foreground and, above it in the background, the world’s largest snake, the Titanoboa.

A. guajiraensis can be considered a distant ancestor of the Philippine saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus). The title of the published study is “A new longirostrine dyrosaurid (Crocodylomorpha, Mesoeucrocodylia) from the Paleocene of north-eastern Colombia: biogeographic and behavioural implications for new-world dyrosauridae." Fossils of a partial skeleton of the newly discovered extinct crocodile species were discovered in the same Colombian coal mine with the world’s largest snake, called the Titanoboa, also extinct. The study also said this freshwater relative of modern crocodiles had competed with the Titanoboa for food. A report posted on the University of Florida website on the eve of the study’s publication revealed that the fossils of the 20-foot extinct crocodile were found in a northern Colombian coal mine, unearthed in excavations led by the study’s co-authors Florida Museum associate curator of vertebrate paleontology Jonathan Bloch and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute paleobotanist Carlos Jaramillo. “The same thing that snuffed out the dinosaurs killed off most of the crocodiles alive at the time. The dyrosaurids are one of the few groups to survive the extinction and later become more successful," added the report, citing lead author Alex Hastings, a graduate student at the Florida Museum of Natural History and University of Florida’s department of geological sciences. — RSJ, GMA News