Dinosaurs are relegated to the distant past and movie screens, but some of the creatures that shared the Earth with them are still around. Crocodiles have scarcely changed in eons because they’re good at what they do. They’re so good, in fact, that dinosaurs were on the menu 93 million years ago. We know this thanks to a first-of-its-kind discovery of a fossil croc. Years of scanning and modeling of the rock-encased specimen confirms there’s still a dinosaur in this croc’s stomach.
The fossil, an example of the extinct Confractosuchus sauroktonos, was discovered in 2010 as part of a joint effort between the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum and the University of New England. These institutions have collaborated on a new study detailing the find in the journal Gondwana Research. The fossil was first scanned in 2015 with a device called Dingo, the only neutron imaging instrument in Australia. While the crocodile was sealed inside a coffin of stone, the scan revealed bird-like bones, which researchers believed were dinosaur bones.
Over the next few years, researchers carefully chipped away as much of the surrounding rock as possible without disturbing the fragile remains. This allowed for higher quality scanning with Dingo and 3D modeling with the Imaging and Medical Beamline instrument at Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organization. The fossil was much larger than the samples usually analyzed with the imager’s synchrotron X-ray beam, but through successive scans, the team was able to reconstruct the animal’s last meal. The analysis confirmed that it had, in fact, eaten a small dinosaur before dying.
As you can see from the above image, the remains don’t look much like a crocodile anymore — fossil finds rarely include full animals, and sometimes remains from more than one creature can be mixed together. After identifying the bones as belonging to a small dinosaur, the team wanted to verify that it was actually eaten by the croc before its death. The chemistry of the rock provided that evidence. They factored in things like plant roots and geological features across rock fragments, concluding that the animal most likely chomped its dino prey shortly before a megaflood event that buried and killed it.
The specimen is currently on display at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum in Winton, Queensland.
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