Australia is famous for many reasons, but perhaps none tickles the imagination like its fauna: the continent is populated by incredible animals, unique in the world and very often lethal, whether they are spiders, snakes, scorpions or crocodiles.
And it is precisely the latter that we will talk about now: not the ones that still dominate Australia, but the now extinct ones, who once did not limit themselves to hunting by diving into the water but also by falling from the trees. The story of this frightening hunting technique can be found in this study published in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
swimmers and climbers. The crocodiles discussed in the study are members of the subfamily Mekosuchinae (which some consider a family in its own right, Mekosuchidae), lived in Australia and Oceania perhaps as far back as the Cretaceous (but more probably from the Eocene, 56 million years ago) and became extinct just 3,000 years ago.
The mekosuchini were excellent swimmers, so much so that some specimens reached the Fiji Islands, but the discovery of some fossils within the continent, and some of their physical characteristics, made paleontologists suspect that these crocodiles were not necessarily linked to the water, and spent a lot of time on land.
Confirmation of this hypothesis (which will then lead us to crocodiles falling from trees) came not from the “usual” fossilized bones, but from the eggshells of these animals. Chemical analyzes of these new fossils, found in Murgon, Queensland, showed that the shells had dried out before becoming fossilized, meaning that the eggs themselves were not laid in water, but in a dry area – probably the bottom of a seasonal lake that dried up during the hot season.
It’s raining crocodiles. But where did these crocodiles live when they weren’t swimming, and why did they lay their eggs far from the water? The area surrounding the area where the eggs were found was, 50 million years ago, almost completely covered by rainforest: the mekosuchids therefore had to be adapted to arboreal life, given that climbing allowed the young to stay away from dangers, and the adults to have a privileged observation point on potential prey.
And today? Even today’s crocodiles know how to climb trees if necessary, and mekosuchids had, according to the authors of the study, learned to attack their prey from above.
According to one of the authors of the study, Mike Archer of the University of South Wales, not all Australian crocodiles attacked from the trees: the technique was probably limited to species that did not exceed one and a half meters in length – it is unlikely that species that reached six meters in length would ambush.
You decide if the idea of crocodiles raining down from the trees is less scary now…
