King of the Crocodylians
Subtitle: The Paleobiology of Deinosuchus (Life of the Past)
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: June 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 220
ISBN-13: 9780253340870
Subjects: Dinosaurs & the prehistoric world; Palaeontology; Prehistoric archaeology; Vertebrate Paleontology; Science; Science/Mathematics; Paleontology; Deinosuchus
First sentence: It is late autumn, many years in the past in the area of Lowndes County, close to Montgomery, central Alabama.
Description: "Toward the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, during a time known as the Late Cretaceous, a new type of giant predator appeared along the southern coasts of North America. It was a huge species of crocodylian called Deinosuchus. Neither a crocodile nor an alligator, it was at the base of the ancestry of both modern groups, but it reached weights of many tons and it had some features unique to the species. Average-sized individuals were bigger than most of the carnivorous dinosaurs with which they coexisted; the largest specimens were the size of a T. rex. This book is the biography of these giant beasts. It tells the long history of their discovery and reports on new research about their makeup.

The book also deals with the ancient life and geology of the coastal areas where Deinosuchus thrived, its competitors, and its prey, which probably included carnivorous dinosaurs. There is also detailed discussion of the methods used to determine the size of these giant animals, the dating of the fossils, the nature of their living environments, and how we know who ate whom 80 million years ago."--Jacket.