Suchomimus was a huge, meat-eating dinosaur with a crocodile-like mouth that lived 110 to 120 million years past, during the middle Cretaceous time.

Characteristics and environment

Unlike most giant theropods, Suchomimus had a much extended, low snout and narrow jaws studded with some 100 teeth, not very sharp and curving somewhat backward. The tip of the snout was distended and carried a "rosette" of longer teeth. The animal is reminiscent of crocodilians that eat mainly fish, such as the living gharial, a type of large crocodile with a much extended, slim snout, from the region of India.

Suchomimus also had a tall additional room of its vertebrae which may have held up some kind of low flap, ridge or sail of skin, as seen in much more overstated form in Spinosaurus. The overall impression is of a huge and powerful creature that ate fish and meat more than 100 million years ago, when the Sahara was a lush, swampy habitat.

Classification

Suchomimus has been placed in the middle of the spinosaurs, a group of predators. Apart from the back ridge, Suchomimus was very alike to Baryonyx which also had strong forelimbs and a enormous sickle-curved claw on its "thumb". And, as with Baryonyx, the claw was the first fossil part to be noticed by palaeontologists. Suchomimus was significantly larger than Baryonyx, but the latter might approximately have been a juvenile of the former. Detailed study shows that the specimen of Suchomimus was itself not fully grown when it died.

 

Discovery

After discovering new specimens of Carcharodontosaurus and the SuperCroc, Chicago-based palaeontologist Paul Sereno and his team additional a discovery in 1997. In the Sahara, near the Tenere Desert in Niger, they establish fossils that represented about two-thirds of the skeleton of an enormous meat-eater. This was named Suchomimus ("crocodile mimic") after the shape of its head.