A team of palaeontologists led by researchers from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County have just announced the discovery of a bizarre, bipedal, toothless crocodile relative from the Triassic Period.
This oddity has been named Labrujasuchus expectatus, or ‘witch croc’, after the old Spanish name for Ghost Ranch, ‘Ranchos de los Brujos’ – the site in New Mexico, US, where its remains were found.
In a study published today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, researchers described Labrujasuchus as looking very much like a group of bipedal dinosaurs known as the ornithomimosaurs. Like these Cretaceous-aged dinosaurs, Labrujasuchus walked on two legs and possessed a toothless beak.
Despite its superficial resemblance to later dinosaurs, Labrujasuchus belongs to the branch of archosaurs that led to crocodiles, which as semi-aquatic, quadrupedal animals with jaws full of teeth couldn’t look any more different than this long-lost, distant relative. However, Labrujasuchus does look a lot like other crocodile-line archosaurs from the Triassic.
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The shuvosaurs are a group of beaked, bipedal archosaurs that roamed the Southern US during the Late Triassic, from 235 to 201 million years ago. Labrujasuchus belongs to this group of dinosaur lookalikes and serves as yet another example of how reptiles that lived during this period – crocodile relatives and dinosaurs – experimented with similar body plans.
“We see a lot of the successful strategies for modern animals and non-avian dinosaurs first arise in the Triassic, and shuvosaurs are a great example of that convergent evolution,” said lead author Alan Turner. “Bipedalism is certainly a unique path for crocodile relatives to take, but it’s a path well-trod by dinosaurs and later birds. It obviously worked for these animals.”
Labrujasuchus is only the fifth species of shuvosaur identified, but it fills the gap between two earlier discovered shuvosaurs from the region. This was an evolutionary link palaeontologists expected, hence the species name ‘expectatus’. While the existence of an animal like Labrujascuhus may have been expected, the discovery of its remains is still remarkable.
"We wanted to highlight how the fossil record works,” said co-author Nate Smith when explaining how Labrujasuchus expectatus got its name. “Finding one shuvosaur from earlier in the Triassic and one from later meant that we palaeontologists knew there were probably more from in-between waiting to be discovered and described.”
This discovery comes 20 years after Smith and his colleagues first started excavations at Ghost Ranch. The 21,000-acre site in north central New Mexico has been a popular site for palaeontologists ever since fossils were first discovered in the late 19th century.
In 1947, the renowned palaeontologist Edwin H. Colbret documented the discovery of more than a thousand well-preserved skeletons of a tiny, Triassic-aged dinosaur known as Coelophysis.
Ghost Ranch has also attracted many film makers and served as the backdrop for several major blockbusters, including two Oscar winners for Best Picture in No Country for Old Men (2008) and Oppenheimer (2024).
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