Ancient Crocodile was the Largest of Its Kind at a Staggering 30 Feet in Length

A massive, prehistoric crocodile rivaled dinosaurs in terms of its size. Researchers have unearthed the world's largest crocodile, which was about the size of a bus.

The marine crocodile, in this case, is dubbed Machimosaurus rex, and lived about 120 million years ago. While crocodiles today largely avoid the ocean, this crocodile actually thrived in a marine environment, growing to over 30 feet long from head to tail. It's estimated to have weighed as much as three tons.

"It would likely have been something of an ambush predator, hanging around in shallow water hunting turtles and fishes and may waiting for some land animals to come a little too close to the shore," said Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland who was not involved in the new research, in an interview with National Geographic. "This is a neat new discovery from a part of the world that hasn't been well-explored for fossils."

Most other species that belonged to the extinct Machimosaurus genus of crocodiles have been discovered in Europe and North America. Analyses of those fossils, though, show that they were affected by a mass extinction during the end of the Jurassic Period. This new fossil, though, shows that the species was still alive at the time and may have continued to thrive for about 25 million years after the extinction event.

The findings could shed new light on the mass extinction, and tell scientists a bit more about this species of crocodile, as well.

The findings are published in the journal Cretaceous Research.

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