This croco-dolphin has it all The 180 million-year-old fossil points to a missing link.

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An artist's impression ofMagyarosuchus fitosi.
Márton Szabó
▼ Most people associate the Jurassic Period with depictions of feathered monstersgallivanting across the surface of Earth, establishing their claim as the dominant creatures of the planet. (And perhaps also Jeff Goldblum’s  finest, most shirtless onscreen  performance.) But we ought not to forget that the marine world was teeming with its own gargantuan beasts at the time. A 180 million-year-old fossil has led scientists to identify a new species of a marine crocodile possessing a tail fin not unlike modern-day dolphins. The discovery, reported  Thursdayin the journalPeerJ, ostensibly fills a missing link in the crocodile family’s evolutionary tree, reconciling a gap where they branched out and either continued to evolve into bony-armored creatures with limbs made for walking, or returned to the water to develop flippers and tail fins.
A Hungarian collector named Attila Fitos first found the fossil in question in the Gerecse Mountains in 1996, and it’s sat in the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest ever since. The research team decided to name the new species preserved in that fossilMagyarosuchus fitosi, in Fitos’s honor. That animal turns out to be an almost 16-foot long behemoth with an incredibly large, pointed snout made for snatching prey, a tail fin to help it swim, and body armor more closely associated with terrestrial reptiles. It’s thought to have been one of the biggest coastal predators of its time.
The specimen, explains Mark Young, a paleontologist with the University of Edinburgh and a coauthor of the new study, was previously classified as a teleosauridin the genus Steneosaurus. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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niya

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