Winton 'broken dinosaur killer' croc has dinosaur in its stomach

The crocodile specimen was discovered on Elderslie Station, near Winton and excavated by staff and volunteers from the Museum in 2010.

Preserved in a soft siltstone concretion, the fossil was partially crushed by a front-end loader during the removal of overburden from a sauropod dinosaur excavation site.

Numerous small bones exposed within the fractured concretion revealed the partial skeleton of a small Cretaceous animal.

It is the second known broken dinosaur killer crocodile or Confractosuchus sauroktonos to give it its proper name, both found in the Winton Formation.

The new one has more than lived up to its fearsome name with skeleton remains inside it showing its last meal was a bird-hipped dinosaur known as an ornithopod,

The find is the first evidence of crocodile predation of a dinosaur in Australia.

The discovery of a small juvenile ornithopod in the gut contents of a Cretaceous-aged crocodile is extremely rare, as only a handful of examples of dinosaur predation are known globally.

Research on Confractosuchus was led by Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum Research Associate Dr Matt White through the University of New England in collaboration with the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation.

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The small densely packed and fragmented bones in the concretion were too fragile for rock to be removed from them by conventional mechanical preparation methods and to identify the animal, the fragmented concretion was placed in the care of Dr Joseph Bevitt, Senior Instrument Scientist at ANSTO.

Dr Bevitt used neutron and synchrotron X-ray micro-CT scanning technologies to identify where bones were located within the concretion.

Dr White used the scan data files to digitally prepare the specimen, a process that involved ten months of computer processing, so that a 3D reconstruction of the bones could be made.

Dr White said the number of bones present in the concretion was staggering, with 35% of the crocodile preserved with a near-complete skull with dentition and semi-articulated postcranial skeleton.

"At the time of its death this freshwater crocodile was around 2.5m long and still growing," Dr White said.

"While Confractosuchus would not have specialised in eating dinosaurs, it would not have overlooked an easy meal, such as the young ornithopod remains found in its stomach."

The ornithopid was a juvenile weighing 1.7kg but given it was partly digested it could not be exactly classified.

Dr White said dinosaurs were part of the Cretaceous ecology as scavengers, predators and prey.

"It is likely dinosaurs constituted an important resource in the Cretaceous ecological food web," he said.

"Given the lack of comparable global specimens, this prehistoric crocodile and its last meal will continue to provide clues to the relationships and behaviours of animals that inhabited Australia millions of years ago."

Confractosuchus sauroktonos joins other significant specimens at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum including Australovenator wintonensis, Australia's most-complete carnivorous dinosaur, Ferrodraco lentoni, Australia's most-complete pterosaur, and bones from the large sauropod species Savannasaurus elliottorum and Diamantinasaurus matildae.

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