Posted on 10/29/2001 11:47:01 AM PST by umbra
The crocodile was a silent stalker, as long as a school bus and weighing almost 18,000 pounds. It cruised the primordial rivers of what is now Saharan Africa, looking for unwary dinosaurs to eat.
"It was absolutely enormous, said a University of Chicago paleontologist, Paul Sereno, of the 8,165 kilogram creature. "There is nothing that would be able to handle that animal. It's like a torpedo of muscle five feet in diameter. (with body armour) The skull of the world's largest living crocdile looks like an hors d'oeuvre by comparison." In an age of giants 110 million years ago Sarcosuchus imperator was a top-of-the-food chain predator with four foot jaws that could gobble fish 12 feet (4 meters) long. The ancient crocodile was probably able to scoot ashore to bring down dinosaurs weighing tons.
Reporting on the website of the journal Science, the team of paleontologists led by Mr. Serno for the first time described the habits of this beast, whose remains were found in Central Africa's bone-dry Tenere desert in an area of Niger called Gadoufaoua-"the place where camels fear to tread in the Tuareg language.
I still would like to see the mathematical model where something that weighs over nine tons and is only as large as a school bus can swim. Maybe the water was several times more dense then than it is now. But even then, let's give the sucker a foot that spans twenty square feet of surface area. Four feet means 80 square feet. That means the beast exerted 32,400 psi just when walking. Is there any swamp that can hold up under such pressures? Or did the croc have huge footprints?
Note, it could be possible, but I'd like to see some real math.
42.
The article says it weighs 18,000 lbs. 1 gallon of water weighs 7.49 lbs. So it would have neutral bouyancy if it occupied 2,043 gallons, or 288 cubic feet. So, if it were 30 feet long, it would have an average diameter of 3.49 feet.
Big, but not THAT big...
I don't blame them!
My uneducated guess is that they fell victim to changing weather patterns which interrupted their ability to reproduce. Modern crocs are pretty dependent upon just the right temperature for reproduction.
Real math?
Okay, it weighs 18,000 lbs. The density of regular water (not salt) is 62.4 lb/ft3. So the volume of the beast to be able to float in regular water must be 288.4 cubic feet.
They said its mouth was 4 foot in diameter. So lets assume a simple cylindrical shape, 4 foot in diameter. The cross sectional area of this shape is 12.5 square feet (=PI/4*Diameter^2).
That means the beasty would only have to be 23 feet long to be able to float in fresh water.
More to the point? How many croc hunters could it eat in one bite.
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