One of the strangest looking crocodiles didn’t swim — it walked on land in the Late Cretaceous with a heavy set of interlocking armor and replaceable teeth.
“It has a shell on its back similar to armadillos,” says Bruno Borsoni, a master’s student in evolutionary biology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
In fact, the extinct species' name — Armadillosuchus arrudai — comes from a combination of the words “armadillo” and “suchus,” which means crocodile in Greek. The arrudai part refers to Brazilian paleontologist João Tadeu Arruda, who made many fossil discoveries in São Paulo state where this creature was first found.
Where was Armadillosuchus arrudai Discovered?
The armadillo crocodile was first described in 2009 in a study published in the Journal of South American Earth Sciences. Specimens of this creature have only been discovered in Brazil in the Bauru Basin, which developed roughly 80 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous.
