Name This Critter

In very broad, non taxonomic terms, can you name this animal?

If you said dinosaur, you were wrong. If you said crocodile, then congrats! Yeah, I wouldn’t have known it either.

Carl Zimmer (of The Loom) once again has a great piece up in the New York Times about this animal.

It’s a wonderful example of convergent evolution, where separate lineages develop the same body plan independent of each other. The animal is named Effigia okeeffeae, after the artist Georgia O’Keeffe who lived near the area where it was discovered in New Mexico. Related to modern day crocodiles, this animal walked the earth some 80 million years before dinosaurs showed up on the scene.

For those unaware of convergent evolution, there are numerous cool examples to be found in today’s extant fauna. (Quick vocab word: extant is the opposite of extinct). Some of the best examples of convergence are comparisions between placental mammals and marsupial mammals. There are placental flying squirrels and there are marsupial sugar gliders (see pictures). There are placental wolves and there were (until recently) marsupial wolves. Sharks and dolphins, barnacles and limpets, and a couple of plants that outwardly resemble cacti are other examples. I could go on and on. I just wanted to give you a sampling of convergence as seen in its wide spectrum across nature.

So to this list, we can now add early crocodilians that looked like dinosaurs!