In the wetlands of prehistoric Colombia, there was once a fearsome 4,000-pound, 23-foot-long relative of the crocodile with a bite that could probably chomp through a car. And it needed it, judging by fossil evidence indicating that the animals it ate were even bigger as the predator itself. It was called Purussaurus, and it was a beast.
As researchers report in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, fossil bite marks from Colombia’s La Venta region provide the clearest evidence that giant crocodilians actively hunted even bigger creatures, mostly mammals, during the Middle Miocene, over 10 million years ago.
The Pebas wetland system is a vast Amazonian mega swamp that spread across the nation’s we now know as Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. La Venta was one section, and it was packed with giant animals, from gigantic birds to enormous saber-toothed marsupials and snakes so big that we usually only see them imagined in horror movies. Even in a land of giants, Purussaurus was near the top of the heap.
The Purussaurus Had Twice the Bite Force of a Saltwater Crocodile
Researchers looked at four fossils belonging to three large plant-eating species, including a rhino-sized mammal called a Pericotoxodon that could weigh up to nearly 1000 kilograms. Several bones had circular puncture marks, showed evidence of crushing damage, and had scratches consistent with crocodilian attacks. The wounds were mostly concentrated around the head and jaws, the exact places modern crocodiles like to latch onto their prey.
If that wasn’t enough evidence, the tooth marks were a pretty close match for Purussaurus teeth, which were more than an inch across. The researchers ran some bite force calculations and found that the animal could exert roughly twice the force of a modern saltwater crocodile, which has one of the, if not the, strongest bites of any living animal, coming in around 3,700 psi.
Purussaurus was taking down animals weighing just over half a ton, sometimes animals approaching a full metric ton, so it needed every square inch of bite force it could muster.
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