Green Tea and Velociraptors

Dwarf crocodiles are the cutest, even if they’ve been dead for 150 million years..

Jon Tennant December 27, 2014

Europe 150 million years ago must have been a brilliant place to go on holiday. Tropical islands, warm lagoons to bathe, a warm climate, and nine metre long crocodiles noshing on anything that couldn’t swim fast enough. Ok, so maybe not that great for humans, but if you were an ancient archosaur, living alongside dinosaurs and other now extinct animals, life must have been pretty sweet.

These giant crocodiles were known as metriorhynchids, and were fully adapted to swim in the seas. Living alongside them, though, were smaller but by no means less impressive crocodiles known as atoposaurids. These are the cute little, but unfortunately extinct, guys I’ve been studying as part of my PhD for the last couple of years, and they are some of the best preserved fossil crocodiles we’ve got.

Alligatorellus bavaricus, newly named from Bavaria, Germany. Tennant and Mannion (2014)

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Green tea and Velociraptors turns into beer and dwarf crocodiles

Jon Tennant October 8, 2013

I’m in Berlin. I’ve just managed to find a chicken donner kebab, and am pausing research briefly to write this. I’m currently on leave from London, with a ridiculously hectic couple of months ahead: I’ve just been to Munich to see a dwarf crocodile specimen, Alligatorellus beaumonti (from Bavaria), which conveniently happened to coincide with Oktoberfest, and am now here to visit another specimen, Theriosuchus ibericus, from Spain. Preliminary glances at the material in Berlin makes me think the Spanish material may be a new genus altogether (whatever that actually means), and another broken up specimen of Alligatorellus might be a new species, based on what I can tell from it’s body armour (yeah, these crocs were awesome!)

Alligatorellus beaumonti, holotype specimen. Copyright: Bavarian State Collection, Munich

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Dwarf crocodiles in Munich

Jon Tennant April 4, 2013

My PhD consists of two parts. The first is investigating the dynamics of biodiversity across the Jurassic/Cretaceous interval about 145 million years ago. I want to see if when we consider the biases of the fossil record whether there was a ‘hidden’ mass extinction, and what were the ecological, physiological or environmental factors that correspond to this. This involves looking at turtles, birds, dinosaurs, marine reptiles, lizards, snakes, crocodiles and any other tetrapod group at the time – that’s anything with four feet, flippers or wings (see previous post for an update on all this jazz).

Evolutionary relationships of major tetrapod groups – many extinct, and many still with us today! Source.

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