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True to Life?

Profile

Species: rugosus, riograndensis
Range: Late Cretaceous (Campanian, 84-73 MYA) from the United States and Mexico, including Texas, Utah, Montana, Georgia, Arkansas, New Jersey
Size estimate: 35-40 ft length, 6-8 tons
Discovery: William J. Holland, 1909
Classification: eureptilia, archosauria, pseudosuchia, crocodilia, alligatoroidea

True to Life?

Since no one has ever seen a living dinosaur, and the missing pieces of the fossil record withhold important clues to their appearance, no artistic representation of a dinosaur ever gets it 100% right. On top of that, new discoveries can change our ideas of extinct creatures drastically. So, how close does this sculpture come to what we know of the original animal?

• Most workers split the Deinosuchus genus into two species. The big skull in the Stewart Museum represents D. riograndensis, the big species. This sculpture represents the smaller species, D. rugosus, from the eastern part of the United States. When Deinosuchus was alive, a shallow but large inland sea covered the Great Plains, splitting the continental US into two parts: Laramidia, a spaghetti string of a subcontinent to the west, and the mysterious Appalachia. We have very little fossil evidence from the late Mesozoic for this region, but it has yielded some good evidence for Deinosuchus nonetheless.
• As relatives of modern alligators and caimans, Deinosuchus probably resembled them in a general sense, with most of the differences showing up in skulls and in fine details. Bear in mind, though, that it predated both caimans and Alligator by tens of millions of years and likely was not ancestral to either group, so that limits what comparisons we can make to get an idea of what it looked like.
• One prominent feature of the skull which defines Deinosuchus as a genus occurs at the tip of its snout. In addition to its nostrils, located on the top of the bulb at the tip of the nose and pointing slightly backwards, Deinosuchus bore an additional two holes. Scientists do not know why they had them, but only Deinosuchus had them. The unusual nostrils on this sculpture may be attempting to interpret those holes as nostrils, but it’s tough to say since their placement doesn’t closely match any of the features of a Deinosuchus skull in that area.
• Colors on modern alligatorids range from black to brown to grey, sometimes with patterns of yellow. They don’t really get green, although in some environments they may appear green due to algae levels in the water. In the right environment, namely in caves where they get covered in bat guano, some crocodilians turn orange, so crocodile color has some interesting twists and turns to it. Since most large living animals don’t produce green pigment—and Deinosuchus rugosus counts as large—the green in its current color scheme is probably a fanciful choice, but the patterning and the brown may well be plausible.
• Nobody currently knows how best to reconstruct the pattern of scutes on the backs of fossil crocodilians. It’s like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces don’t actually touch each other. And you thought puzzling dinosaur skeletons back together was hard . . . .
• Deinosuchus rugosus has its fascination, but yes, we’d also like to see a D. riograndensis sculpture here at some point.