The discovery of a 7-million-year-old prehistoric crocodile fossil in Peru has given paleontologists more clues as to how modern crocodiles, all freshwater creatures in the Andean country, first arrived on land from the sea.
According to a Peruvian research team that analyzed remains of the species’ jaw and skull, the animal would likely have crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the coast of South America, later populating what is now southern Peru.
Researcher Rodolfo Salas said his team had collected partial skeletons of this species in recent years and that, after finding a jawbone in Peru’s Sacaco Desert in 2020, they understood that these animals evolved after living in salt water.
“The new species of crocodile that we are introducing to the world lived in Sacaco 7 million years ago,” Salas said of the species, which was named Sacacosuchus cordovai. The crocodile’s ancestor would have been four meters long, he added.
Other skeletons of prehistoric animals have already been found in Sacaco. Experts say that millions of years ago the desert was a sea floor inhabited by whales, giant sharks and crocodiles, among other marine species.
In March, a team of paleontologists led by Salas presented the fossil skull of a 12-meter-long “sea monster”, a predator that lived 36 million years ago in an ancient ocean off the central coast of Peru.
