We often picture the Caribbean as a place to relax and escape life’s challenges. Evidently, so too did the sebecid — a tall crocodile-like species that replaced the dinosaur as an apex predator. Paleontologists have thought the species went extinct about 11 million years ago. Instead, the creature that some describe as a cross between a greyhound and a crocodile was just biding its time on tropical islands.
Signs of Caribbean Apex Predator
Paleontologists unearthed one sebecid tooth and two in the Dominican Republic dating back 6 million years, indicating that the tall, 20-foot-long land-based predator existed five million years longer than previously thought, according to a report in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
It’s possible the predators employed the Caribbean to escape the factors that killed them off elsewhere. The Caribbean was long thought to be free of such massive predators during the early Miocene.
