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Prehistoric Crocodiles
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The Brazilian Tyrannosaurus
year: 2019 https://www.oeco.org.br/reportagens/o-ti...rasileiro/ A little over a month ago, in early July, a curious event took place in the municipality of Brasiléia, in the state of Acre - Brazil. Robson Cavalcante, an 11 year old boy was fishing with his father on a bank of the Acre River when he stepped on something strange. "I was fishing then I stepped on something different and called my father. He dug a little and I thought it was a dinosaur" said the boy. The father of the kid, the carpenter José Militão returned to the site the next day to dig further and was impressed with what he found: "I used a hoe and a pick and I discovered that it happened to be a fossil. I did it very carefully so as not to damage it." What Robson had found was not a dinosaur. Nevertheless it was the remains of a monster. It was the lower jaw of a Purusaurus, the largest Caiman that ever lived. The news of the discovery of a dinosaur spread through the streets of Brasiléia. It didn't take long for the rumor to spread more than 200 kilometers away, in the state capital, Rio Branco, more specifically in the Paleontology Laboratory of the Federal University of Acre (UFAC). This is how paleontologist Jonas Filho learned about the find and he went to investigate it. "It's a purussaurus caiman, one of the largest that ever existed in the Amazon, about 8 million ago. It's a complete jaw. It seems that besides the jaw it has a skull that is being exposed" said the paleontologist. The fossilized jaw is more than a meter long which gives the dimensions of the scary mouth that the animal had. The boy Robson and his father inside the lower jaw of a Purussaurus. Photo: Personal file/Raylanderson Frota.  *This image is copyright of its original author In the following days, Jonas Filho carefully collected the block of rock containing the fossil and transported it from the banks of the Acre River to the workbench in his laboratory. There the newly discovered fossil became part of the collection of Purusaur bones that paleontologists in Acre have been collecting for decades. The star of the collection is a complete skull, the only one ever discovered, a magnificent specimen one and a half meters long, half a meter wide and another half meter high. The skull was found in the 1980s in the ravines of the Acre River by a team of Brazilian paleontologists (from UFAC) and American paleontologists from the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. The fossil is so big and heavy - estimated to be over a ton - that to remove and transport it, it had to be cut into several parts, which were glued back together in the laboratory. The removal of all the rock surrounding the skull was a work of many months, carried out by experts in Los Angeles. When the fossil was finally released from the rock, the result proved impressive. The first complete skull of a purusaur is imposing and frightening. It is in no way less impressive than those skulls of tyrannosaurus rex, the most famous of all dinosaurs, which lived in North America dozens of millions of years before the purusaurus. After being studied, the complete skull of the purusaurus returned to Acre where it has been kept for more than thirty years under an acrylic dome in the exhibition room of the Paleontology Laboratory of the UFAC, in Rio Branco. Since then, replicas of that stupendous skull have been modeled and exhibited in several natural history museums around the world. But the original one is in Acre - Brazil. Complete skull of Purusaurus at the Laboratory of Paleontology Federal University of Acre - Brazil. Photo: Peter Moon.  *This image is copyright of its original author
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