Revising Stomatosuchus (Patreon)

Hi! Some of you will know that I've been revising the giant crocodylomorph montage (its last appearance here being in early 2017) - it's needed both for The Big Book as well as a press release relevant to new scientific work (appearing this March 2019). I've had t re-do several of the animals, both to correct mistakes and to give them a colour scheme (albeit in black and white). Here I want to talk about what happened with Stomatosuchus, the remarkable giant neosuchian crocodyliform from the Cenomanian of Egypt, the only known specimen of which was destroyed in WWII.

I first produced a very speculative reconstruction of Stomatosuchus in 2001 for my Geology Today article on crocodylomorph diversity (available from my publications page here: ). I wanted to portray it as a sort of 'pelican croc' that used its massively long jaws, a big speculative gular pouch and its numerous small teeth to somehow forage on small fish and/or crustaceans. The 2001 reconstruction was done freehand, without much checking of measurements and so on (recall that only a skull is known for this animal). It was inspired by David Peters's illustration from his beautifully illustrated book Giants of Land, Sea and Air: Past and Present, but not produced with the Peters reconstruction in front of me at the time. It was always obvious that I screwed up on the proportions, almost certainly making the tail too short...

It later occurred to me that I'd drawn the eyes too large apart - the actual skull (today known only from drawings) shows that the eyes were closely set on the top of the head. I therefore corrected that digitally, giving us this version...

This reconstruction also doesn't show the numerous small teeth (as many as 160 in the upper jaws alone) present in this animal. They should probably be visible in both upper and lower jaws, even if they were short.

Despite its issues, I've used this illustrations many times since 2001 and it features in the previous version of the giant montage. As an animal of c 10 m long, the drawing was also not big enough to look large relative to the other animals in the montage. Ergo, a new version was needed. So, for March 2019, I created this...

The proportions are wholly speculative, but what we see here is essentially based on what we might guess based on other stem-neosuchians. I assumed that the skull was very large relative to body size: as in, slightly longer than the distance between the limb girdles. The paired, rectangular (longest axis transverse) dorsal scutes are inferred based on those of other stem-neosuchians (like goniopholidids), as is the rest of the scalation. The numerous short teeth were added digitally, as was the shading inside the mouth (the illustration would look weird if the inside of the mouth was left white). I figured that this is a strongly aquatic animal, so I deliberately depicted large feet and a deep tail with an unusually high number of dorsal triangular spines. I then decided that I'd overdone it on those, and that there should be less at the base. A commenter on twitter also noted that the hindlimb was likely too slender. So I made further modifications (digitally), and here's the final version...

The colour scheme is entirely speculative and inspired by that of Crocodylus, the dark areas being greenish or grey and the pale bits being yellowish or off-white. I decided this would work for an animal of giant swamps and big, meandering rivers of the sort inhabited by this animal. I then realised that - again - I'd drawn the eyes too far apart, so a final modification was made...

It's not perfect, but it will do. The end of the tail is a separate illustration (on a separate sheet of paper) and needs to be composited to the rest of the tail in Corel - I haven't done that yet. I should remind you that this animal is known only from a skull that was lost in WWII, and that the only closely related animal - Laganosuchus (two species of which are known) - is only known from a partial skull and some neck vertebrae. In short: lots of speculation.

I hope you like it, and thanks as always for your support. Numerous other updated crocodylomorph images to be added here soon.