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Traces of giant prehistoric crocodiles discovered in northern British Columbia

Giant crocodiles once roamed northeastern British Columbia. A recently published article in Historical Biology features . The sites are from the Peace Region of northeastern British Columbia, north of Tumbler Ridge.

The trace fossils include , made when the crocodiles were scraping the muddy bottoms of lakes and river channels with their claws. Some of these swim traces showed remarkable detail, including parallel striations that represent scale patterns on the crocodiles' feet.

While the Tumbler Ridge area has become , there is something special about crocodiles. Unlike dinosaurs, they survived, and still have .

In 2020, a crane company donated time and personnel to recover . They were transported to , where they are securely stored and will be incorporated into future exhibits.

Ancient giants

The tracks and traces we examined are in the age range of 95–97 million years from the . The tracks included ankylosaurs, ornithopods and turtles.

The size of the crocodiles can be estimated from . We used this distance to estimate a total body length of about nine meters, and possibly as much as 12 meters. This was corroborated by our identification of a partial track, 75 centimeters long, which allowed for a similar length estimate of close to nine meters.

A crocodile of such prodigious size would have weighed around five tons, and would probably have been a top predator. By comparison, the record length of crocodiles living today is about six meters.

Gigantism in crocodiles has been . In North America, the oldest body fossil evidence of giant crocodiles is of Deinosuchus at about 82 million years, . Deinosuchus has been recorded from the United States and Mexico, but never from Canada.

The large swim traces from north of Tumbler Ridge may represent a precursor to Deinosuchus, that lived at least 13 million years before the previously reported first appearance of giant crocodiles in North America.

Tracking environmental changes

The environment consisted of a low-lying delta-plain with shallow lakes, river channels and vegetated wetlands, situated about 100 kilometers inland from the shoreline of that linked the Gulf of Mexico with the Arctic Ocean.

It was possible to document multiple episodes of flooding and emergence, which determined whether and when animals walked or swam. This helped explain the variety of tracks and traces that were identified.

These findings follow our discovery of , made by much smaller crocodilians (between one and two meters long) within the . Our familiarity with the nature of the exceptionally well-preserved traces from near Tumbler Ridge led directly to the first identification of crocodile swim traces in Africa.

The co-existence of traces made by and swimming crocodiles on a single surface was intriguing and unprecedented in the fossil record. One of the ankylosaur trackways is the smallest thus far described from the region. It comprised tracks only 10 centimeters wide, presumably made by a juvenile.