An ancient skull hints crocodiles swam from Africa to the Americas
A resemblance between a long-lost African crocodile and modern American crocs goes beyond the shared bump on their snouts. New analyses of a roughly 7-million-year old skull from the extinct Crocodylus checchiai suggest that crocodiles journeyed from Africa to the Americas millions of years ago, researchers report July 23 in Scientific Reports. Unearthed in the 1930s, the fossil came from what’s now Libya and sat for decades in a museum. With CT scanning, scientists have now mapped the skull’s structure, revealing hidden anatomical features that tie the animal closely to the four species of American crocodiles alive today. “It really looks like an American true crocodile, but it comes from Africa,” says Massimo Delfino, a paleoherpetologist at the University of Turin in Italy. Genetic analyses had already linked the Nile crocodile with its American kin. Though scientists suspected that crocs long ago colonized one of the locales before journeying to the other,...