Crocodiles were prepared with “legs like salukiyat” once in the Caribbean Sea region

Over the past three decades, fossil scientists have discovered sharp and developed teeth in prehistoric times in the Caribbean Islands. The strange part? According to scientists, it was never assumed that the owners of these teeth – the predator of the crossbar – there.

But an international team of researchers found that millions of years ago, a long-standing crocodile plotter called Sebecid wandering in the Caribbean Sea-is permissible there until about five million years, a long time after the death of its relatives in South America about 11 million years ago. The theoretical results are strengthened that the ground bridges or a series of islands were linking the Caribbean to South America.

In 2023, researchers found another fossilized age in the Dominican Republic, this time with two paragraphs, allowing them to define remains in the end as belonging to Sebecids. As is detailed in a Ticket On Wednesday, in the facts of the Royal Society B, experts dated excavations were published between 7.14 and 4.57 million years – more than three million years of the disappearance of their cousins ​​in South America. “The feelings of finding fossils and realizing what are indescribable,” said the lead author in the study, Lazaro Veniola Lopez, the saint’s scientist at the Museum of Natural History. statement.

According to the statement, some sebecids – described as a long -feet “crocodile) can reach 20 feet (6.1 meters). They were eating meat, chasing after their prey on four long legs. In South America, they were the only members in Notosuchia – a large group of extinct crocodile 66 million years. With this annoying competition, it is no longer in play, Sebecids quickly decreased the food chain.

But how can wild predators reach islands in the Caribbean Sea region? The researchers say that these results support the Gaarlandia hypothesis – the idea that millions of years ago, bridges of the Earth or the island’s chains allowed animals in South America such as Sebecids to reach the Caribbean. When the corridor disappeared, Sebecids could have been removed from any threat that caused their relatives to disappear in South America millions of years ago.

If the researchers emphasize that the strange teeth of other islands also belong to sebecids, this means that these APEX predators affected the environment in the region for millions of years. This is despite the fact that “she was not able to predict this view of the modern ecosystem,” said Jonathan Bluch, a co -author of the study and coordinator of vertebrate fossil science at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Today, most Caribbean predators, such as birds, snakes and even crocodiles, are much smaller.

However, the study shows that when there is smoke, it is possible that there is a fire – or in this case, running, extinct rescued like the sacrifice.