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Hi, and thanks for your contributions Mokele... but I wondered if you have a reference for that ectothermic animals can't develop muscles through exercise bit ... the article I ripped it from is non-technical, but if you're right I wonder why perfectly good scientists are taking their bite bar tests into the wild... . And the lifespan reference was to the period the crocs keep growing, not their total lifespan: the growth rate in most modern crocs slows down dramatically after about 10 years, while it seems the gigantic breeds sustained a high rate of growth for a longer time... but if it caused confusion, it should be clarified. 68.81.231.127 10:30, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)
The reference for the exercise physiology and lack of benefits of conditioning is "Effects of endurance training and captivity on activity metabolism of lizards", Garland et al. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol.1987; 252: 450-456. In this particular study, 2 groups of non-specialized agamid lizards were kept, one was exercised regularly, the other not. To quote from the abstract, "It is concluded that the adaptive response to endurance training, typical of mammals, does not generally occur in lizards. Moreover, levels of chronic activity that would elicit adaptive responses in mammals may be excessive for lizards and may induce pathological effects in joints and skeletal muscle."
As for why wild specimens are used, there are many reasons. First and foremost is that captivity is an un-natural state, and measurements may be skewed by things such as minor nutritional deficiencies. Additionally, many captive crocs have jaw deformities (nutrition has been implicated in this, as have several other aspects of captive care, but there's no even moderately strong consensus on it yet) which could skew tests. Furthermore, captive collections have only a limited number of crocs, often clutchmates or only from a narrow range of species and localities. Wild collection allows more diverse data gathering, reducing potentially confounding hidden variables. Plus, any excuse for fieldwork is a good one. ;-)
I also question the accuracy of the study in question, for two reasons. First, because it concludes that bite power is proportional to size. However, muscle power (including jaw muscles) is proportional to the cross-sectional area of the muscle, and, when scaling up or down in size, cross-sectional areas increase to the square of linear dimensions. Thus, if you double an animal's size, bite power should increase 4-fold, not 2-fold. However, this relationship was probably obscured by the data scatter caused by innate inter-individual variation. Also, the study in question used data from a variety of species. Obviously, a 4 foot gator will have a differnt bite pressure than a 4 foot gharial, due to differnt sizes of muscles, and different locations of muscle attachment in the species. A more accurate study would have relied exclusively on gharials (or had 3 parralell studies for gharials, false gharials and african slender snouts) and studied bite pressures from everything from hatchling to adult in large numbers, then compared differences in skull morphology. I suspect the results would have been much different.
In terms of lifespan, the comment I removed seemed to indicate that Sarcosuchus' lifespan as a whole (not just until adulthood) was significantly longer than most modern crocodilians, which does not seem to be the case. But you're right, it should be clarified. --User:Mokele
Oh, I'm skeptical too... but I find the argument at least plausible, if not probable. Without something more conclusive like preserved stomach contents or tooth marks, it's just speculation. I agree that the fish-eating hypothesis should have more weight... but the article needs a reference for that opinion. (Sereno's was easier to add because I had a copy on hand.) You don't have to know of one offhand, do you?
I don't know much about biomechanics, but I'm always a little skeptical without practical tests, which is hard in extinct species. And the snap-thing isn't necessarily conclusive: C. niloticus does it too. I'd be interested to see a more depth analysis... while gigantic, sauropods have tiny necks and heads. If a croc snagged a drinking titanosaur, it might be able to kill it instantly, or at least hold on until it died and then munch on the body. But even if true, it would be opportunistic, and not the mainstay of its diet.
I'm surprised you haven't commented on Suchomimus. The comment about them fighting is absurd — even if their snouts were broader carnivores aren't MAD :). But it is in half the articles, so it needs to be mentioned. I really need to tone it down a bit more, though.
I expanded the classification mostly because the taxobox conflicted with the rest of the article... rather than force a triangular cladogram into the square hole of the Linnean taxobox, I used the old classification used in the Crocodylia article, and that just needed an explanation. I kept it general... is Deinosuchus an alligator or a croc? I'm not an expert (I'm sure you know far more about general crocodile classification and physiology than I do), but I suppose any look into ancient crocs is going to start with Benton & Clark 1988. They revised it later (1993?) with more characteristics, but the result was garbage... too many homoplasies. One of these days I'll read Schwimmer's book on Deinosuchus, and I've also heard good things about Hua's Ancient Marine Reptiles, but it's pricey.
When I get around to prettying up some of my less than brilliant prose and fixing some typos (philowhat?), I'll consolidate the argument as well... I think we've covered all the major points, but right now it reads more like a back and forth debate than an encyclopedia article :). 68.81.231.127 02:15, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I was thinking that this page really should be named Sarcosuchus and not SuperCroc. SuperCroc was just a tagline for the National Geographic special, while the actual article deals with the animal. I think it would make more sense to have the redirect be for SuperCroc and not Sarcosuchus Jura 17:29, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
The only indicators on the page are that it says 'early cretaceous' and that it could have come into contact with suchomimus which lived at the same time. But it doesnt give the acctual millions of years that it was around for so you have to look at suchomimus's page just to get an idea, even then it isnt perfectly right. Can this be fixed by some one who knows its time range? Spinodontosaurus (talk) 16:57, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
It says in the article that Sarchosuchus was 11-12 m long, nearly as long as Spinosaurus. Spinosaurus was 17-21 m long. What's up with that? Benosaurus 02:16, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
In the article it says 'Deinosuchus is only known from skulls, which are smaller than that of the SuperCroc but the Deinosuchus has a broad snout.....' and it gives a measurment of ‘1.78 m’ for Sarcosuchus. In the Deinosuchus article however, it says that its skull is ‘more than 2 m ’ which statement is correct? There has always been a lot of conflicting measurements with prehistoric creatures in books and on the internet. Its always annoyed me as I’m never sure what to believe. oh well :) Steveoc 86 20:40, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
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I originally removed that image without explanation so I'll explain it now. I consider it outdated and having other problems, for example Purussaurus is portrayed at 12.5m but that seems like an arbitrary number since the source from where it says it got that size (Bocquentin & Melo, 2006) gives a range of 11-13m. The size of Mourasuchus is referenced to Schwimmer (2002) which does say it was 12m but offers no explanation for that. More recent papers like Salas-Gismondi et al. (2007) give a length of 7.8-11m for Purussaurus which is more realistic as the biggest skull has a snout to skull table length of "just" 1.3m, compare that to 1.6m for the biggest Sarcosuchus skull; though it is true that Sarcosuchus has a longer snout. About Mourasuchus, Langston Jr. (2008) estimates the body length of one large specimen of M. arendsi with comparable skull length to the holotype, at 6.6m, I'll quote a bit of the text:
Mourasuchus was a large crocodilian. Known skulls of M. arendsi are approximately 1m long, depending upon the definition of “total skull length” used by various authors.
Skulls around 1m long are Terminonaris/juvenile S. imperator territory, how the 12m estimate came to be, I don't know but I'm searching for the papers describing M. atopus to see if it actually has a 2m long skull. Mike.BRZ (talk) 16:54, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
Should this be mentioned in a serious paleontology article? It would be better if this was treated as trivia, and the article on "Supercroc" linked back to this one. HammerFilmFan (talk) 03:29, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
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