Fossil chunk marks recommend large crocodylians, particularly Purussaurus neivensis, dominated massive prey searching in Miocene South America.
Greater than 10 million years in the past, an unlimited lake unfold throughout a lot of South America, surrounded by a unprecedented assortment of predators and prey. Big turtles and crocodylians occupied its waters, whereas anacondas, saber-toothed mammals, flightless “terror birds,” and sebecids, terrestrial relations of crocodylians, hunted alongside its shores.
Amongst all of those predators, new analysis means that crocodylians performed the dominant position on this Miocene ecosystem.
“There was a lot prey obtainable that mammalian predators couldn’t have eaten all of it,” says Oscar Wilson, postdoctoral researcher on the College of Helsinki.
“Our new examine reveals that crocodylians particularly had been the area’s most vital predators, particularly when it got here to searching massive prey.”
Big crocodylians dominated massive prey
The lakeshore supported an equally spectacular vary of herbivores. Big floor sloths, glyptodonts, which had been relations of armadillos, and a number of other teams of ungulates lived there, together with astrapotheres (“lightning beasts”) and toxodontids. A few of these ungulates might weigh properly over a metric ton.
Their predators might attain huge sizes as properly. The biggest recognized predator within the ecosystem was Purussaurus neivensis, a relative of recent caimans that grew to about seven meters lengthy and weighed roughly 1,800 kilograms. As an apex predator, it might even have helped form the scale of native herbivore populations, in line with the examine.
Chew marks reveal the predator hierarchy
To reconstruct these historic interactions, researchers examined fossils preserved in museum collections. Chew and tooth marks left on herbivore stays present the one direct proof that exact predators interacted with their prey. The fossils included within the evaluation ranged from 10.5 million to 16 million years outdated.
“The frequency of marks seemingly made by Purussaurus means that it was an vital predator in these tropical ecosystems,” Wilson feedback.
Reference: “Bodily proof of crocodylian predation on ungulates within the Center Miocene of Colombia” by Oscar E. Wilson, Jorge W. Moreno-Bernal, Catalina Suarez, Frank Cardozo Tovar, Andrés Vanegas, Rubén Vanegas, Ethan A. Shirley, Patricia A. Holroyd and John-Paul Zonneveld, 16 August 2026, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2026.2701154
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