The Drop Croc

Not another Fearsome Critter, the drop croc is a real thing!  (Or was, having become extinct in the Pleistocene.)  

The drop croc is, just as you might expect from the name, an arboreal species of crocodile which "may have attacked prey by climbing trees and dropping on them."

Today there are only three families of crocodilians: crocodiles, alligators, and gharial.  But the Eocene was an era with expansive growth in the crocodilian line, which expanded to fill the ecological niches left behind by the sudden absence of the dinosaurs.  

Prehistoric crocodilians were a diverse lot.  Five new species were recently found in the Sahara desert, including one which sprouted tusks like a boar, one which was as large as a school bus (!), and another which ran upright like a dog, and was probably unusually intelligent.

Considering the bewildering variety of crocodilians on the scene at the time, perhaps Trilophosuchus rackhami didn't seem so strange to its peers.  Trilophosuchus rackhami was about five feet long, and had a stubby skull with ridges.  These ridges gave rise to its scientific name, which means "Triple Crest Crocodile."  

Either the person who chose that name hadn't heard about the "drops out of trees" thing, or they had a knack for burying the lede.

The drop croc lived in Australia, in what is now Riversleigh in Queensland.  Although today Riversleigh is a dry desert landscape reminiscent of Mars, it was a lush rainforest laced with freshwater streams back in the Pleistocene.  Today this World Heritage site is chock full of fossils, one of the most fossil-rich areas in Australia.  According to the fossil record at Riversleigh, T. rackhami would have had an amazing variety of animals to prey upon, including a marsupial lion, a carnivorous rat-kangaroo, a species of giant platypus, and many more.

And now the bad news!  I researched the heck out of this, and I can't figure out where the "hangs out in trees and drops on prey" thing comes from.  That information is not easily available online, I'm afraid.  

What I did find is that there is only one fossil specimen in the record for T. rackhami, and it is a skull.  Now there are a lot of things you can figure out from a skull.  For one thing, because of the way all the muscles attached, archaeologists are pretty sure that T. rackhami held its head up above its body, in the manner of a modern lizard.  (Modern crocodilians hold their heads in line with their bodies.)

Archaeologists can do a pretty good job of deducing stuff from scant evidence.  But try though I might, I can't figure out any way that you could study a skull and decide that it belonged to an animal that hangs out in the trees and drops on its unwary prey.

I did however find several mentions along the lines of "some people think that this animal might be arboreal, but we don't have any evidence for that."  So I'm very sad to say that the drop croc thing may not be true.  

That doesn't keep me from hunching my shoulders when I walk under a tree, though!

Photo credit: Flickr/Pandiyan