BOSTON, Feb. 18 (UPI) -- A tiny crocodile -- a two-foot long creature with a David Letterman grin -- lived alongside a 40-foot-long, dinosaur-eating monster 110 million years ago in what is now the Sahara Desert, a prominent dinosaur researcher said Monday.
"Our finds in the desert valleys in Niger show why Africa is the new frontier for seeking evidence of how dinosaurs lived," said Paul Sereno, professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago in Illinois.
In addition to the tiny "duck croc" -- with missing front teeth which Sereno's likened to the prominent crack in the smile of the late-night talk show host, Sereno's research team took 20 tons of fossils out of Niger -- located in West Central Africa.
Among those fossils were the giant supercroc that dined on larger reptiles and five other species of crocodile, including the diminutive duck croc that likely ate minnows and other small creatures along the shoreline of rivers and swamps.
"This little crocodile would have been little more than an h'ors d'oevres for super croc," Sereno said in presentations at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, Mass.
He displayed the finely-preserved skull of the duck croc in the palm of his hand. The creature is still without a scientific name, but one will be applied with publication of the discovery in a science journal later this year. Sereno, himself, would have fit in the jaws of super croc known as Sarcosuchus.
Another major find, he said, was the discovery of a furcula -- the wishbone -- belonging to a primitive carnivore, a spinosaur. For years, Sereno said, scientists skeptical of the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds have asked to see the wishbone in the fossil record. Several have been found, but the one Sereno displayed is the most primitive of the dinosaur species to exhibit that part of the skeleton.
"This is one of the classic parts of the anatomy that links dinosaurs to birds," he said. "The argument against the link is difficult to maintain in a sober state today."
Philip Abelson, a scientific advisor to the AAAS in Washington, DC, concurred. "I think this finding cements the theory connecting dinosaurs and birds. Dr. Sereno's work fills in more and more gaps of our understanding of what life was like during the days of the dinosaurs."
Sereno said the area in Niger known as Gadoufaoua contains a vast fossil record. His colleagues and students are attempting to put together a record of not only what creatures populated those swamps and rivers, but of the plant-life that existed at the time as well.
The team worked around daytime temperatures that reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit as well as the occasional sand storm to find the fossils -- some of which were visible from the researchers' vehicles.
Sereno said that some of the creatures found in the desert appear to be close relatives to dinosaurs and other creatures that have been unearthed in Argentina and Brazil. He said that may mean science will have to rethink how long ago the continents of South American and Africa drifted apart.
He suggested that event might not have occurred until about 90 million years ago, while other scientists believe the division may have occurred tens of millions of years earlier.
