Animal Podcast 16 - Deinosuchus

Animal Podcast 16 - Deinosuchus

Today, we follow up my second post with the giant predator of Deinosuchus. I discussed that it probably hunted the 5-ton Parasaurolophus, which is terrifying to think about something that large getting dragged underwater by an even larger predator. This fact alone is crazy: 9-ton crocodilian hunting massive dinosaurs. (We have evidence of this as some hadrosaur tail vertebrae were found with Deniosuchus tooth marks. This shows Deinosuchus ate hadrosaurs sometimes, even if not always.) That sentence reveals another thing, though. Deinosuchus is a crocodilian. Another super croc, Sarcosuchus, is not a crocodilian but a close relative. Deinosuchus is a crocodilian in the vein of crocodiles and alligators, and the largest one. Maybe size is hard to tell from fossils, and many other extinct species may have gotten that big or larger. 

Deinosuchus probably lived like today's largest crocodilian, the saltwater crocodile, patrolling rivers, and the coast of the inland American sea. See, the land now known as the United States was split down the middle by a great inland sea. This made the states this creature was found in, all ten of them, coastal states. These states were Utah, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, New Jersey, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and North Carolina. Now, a few of these, like New Jersey and North Carolina, did not border the actually inland sea but were still coastal areas. The world was so different back then, not to mention these 9-ton crocodilians.