UPDATE: The discovery of a new species of European sebecid named Dentaneosuchus has recently been announced. It lived about forty million years ago during the Middle Eocene and was about the same size as Barinasuchus!
Imagine these things still running around today. This why I love life before/after dinosaurs and why I mostly tell kids about those moments when I work at the museum.
I really appreciate having a paleo channel that gives long overdue attention to Pseudosuchia. I've learned so much and I find it incredible that before seeing your (original upload) video on _Barinasuchus,_ I had no idea 6 meter, 1500kg crocodile cousins stalked the _Llanos_ and _Cerrado_ into the middle of the Miocene. I can't understand why not one other paleo channel (except Dr Polaris) or documentary I have watched in the last thirty years has found that worth mentioning.
wild how little i knew about all the various land crocs before this channel and some others. You'd think people would talk about these weird and wonderful boys more.
Island South America was a really wild place. It puts Australia to shame in its weirdness, and can go toe to toe with any other continent in its level of danger.
@@aceundead4750 the running theory in how terror birds hunted is that they lunge at a smaller prey and trap them under their feet and just peck it to death. This is based on it's paleobiology and it does sound terrifying
Very informative. I knew that the crocodilians were more diverse than most people knew ( ie "bear croc, "boar croc", etc.). But I had no idea that sebecids even existed and survived well into the Cenozoic. Keep up the great work.
I like to think that the Sebecids aren't just the successors of the dinosaurs, but also from the Baurusuchids as well, with both taking the niche of a medium to large size predator in an isolated continent (almost for the Baurusuchids). The Sebecosuchia is such an interesting group, and I'm glad we have content like yours talking about these creatures. Great video as always, keep up with the amazing work !
Fun fact : the cuban crocodile/rhombifer had part of a kind of a same behaviour in the past. It is inferred that they took out of the water so to chase the giant sloths. When these mammals got extinct then the rhombifer returned to some aquatic lifestyle but kept a good ability on land though.
I love your paleochannel and am a huge fan! Channels like this that talk about the more obscure dinosaur/non-dinosaurs are my favorite since it gives the lime light to equally fascinating organisms that put the worlds of prehistory into context. Thank you so much for what you do truly.
It’s funny that you mentioned sebecidae being the successors to dinosaurs because they are actually related to them because they are both part of a group called archosaurs, a clade of diapsids which includes non- avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and extinct relatives of crocodilians like the sebecidae, the only surviving members of archosaurs are crocodiles and birds and since birds are dinosaurs that means they are cousins to the crocodiles and since terror birds count as dinosaurs that live along side sebecidaes like Barinasuchus, then that means they’re also cousins.
I learn something new from every video on this channel. In school I never heard of land crocs, though they were well-known to science when I was a student.
Ack this is why I love your content much! I had never heard of these beauties before but thanks to you I find myself lost in reading about them, and they're quickly becoming one of mt most favorite extinct generea!
I've learned several things from this. This is awesome! I actually have never heard of the Sebecidae, but I have heard of terrestrial crocodiles before like Quikana. So, yeah, sub earned! I like seeing stuff like this get attention.
Wow, great analysis of the new prehistoric reptilian creatures of the Cenozoic Era. So Mammals were not the only animals that ruled the Cenozoic Era but Big Birds and other big reptiles were there as well which are pretty cool and I definitely enjoy it because I adore reptiles and dinosaurs as well, looks like the large reptilian creatures are having a fun time in the Cenozoic Era after the Mesozoic Era. Thank you very much for this and I definitely appreciate the work you did.
Pre-Great American Interchange South America was basically Triassic Redux with archosaurs (birds and crocodilians) being the dominant land carnivores there, except the dicynodont and prosauropod roles were replaced by herbivorous Xenarthran and Meridiungulate, and cynodont roles were filled by sparassodont
So we have... - gigantic running crocodile-like creatures - in South America - living after the Age of Dinosaurs - where they were the largest predatory lifeform - while early hominids started to appear in the Old World South America really IS Lustria from Warhammrr, isn't it?
I wonder if anyone’s investigated their lip structure, given the current interest in whether Therapods have lips Sebecids seem an interesting group to study. Since the big arguments For seem to be that most terrestrial animals need their dentition moist with saliva, and the Against argument by Thomas Carr focusing on Daspletosarurus facial features being similar to modern crocs. In theory they would be the next best group to study outside of Therapoda themselves
The ‘teeth drying out’ argument isn’t really valid anymore and has been disproven by the West African crocodile, which can spend months hibernating in dry burrows, no where near a source of water, and their teeth are completely fine. I think restoring Sebecids with lips is a bit ridiculous. I mean most theropods probably didn’t have lips anyway. The whole lipped theropod idea comes from paloeart trends rather than actual fossil evidence
@@thedoruk6324 in what way do they lose to any competitors? Sharks have outlived all the marine reptiles and the most powerful marine mammals. Sharks are also still super diverse occupying all sorts of ecological niches.
@@thedoruk6324 well thats true but i wouldnt hold that against sharks. The ability to get oxygen fron the air is a massive advantage when tetrapods return to the ocean. They arent limited by the poor oxygen in the ocean which means they can develop larger brains and be very active. Sharks still do well despite the limitation.
Fantastic vid as always. Question for you: Do you think that Sebecidae really was taxonomically limited to just those large forms by the end of their lineage? What I mean is, that could just be the impression that preservation bias is giving us. Large animals preserve better than small ones, and SA's fossil record is only recently becoming as deeply explored as northern continents, with a great many discoveries yet to come, I'd wager. I don't see any reason why there couldn't have been smaller sebecids running around filling mesopredator niches. To borrow an example from your video, while some of Australia's top predator roles were filled by Megalania and Komodo dragons, perenties were still a thing.
I heard the rumors of late surviving dinosaurs. Had no idea about the teeth being seen as evidence. Thanks for another croc packed video! Really interesting that some sebesucids evolved to be semi aquatic, its really the reverse of things like Quinkana! And thanks for covering barinasuchus again, i never tire of hearing about that absolute dragon of the cenozoic.
They would have been like black bears and grizzly bears roaming around forest chasing after deer and other land animals and killing hunters or people visiting national parks.
@@crossroads8370 I imagine they would be absolutely terrifying but awe inspiring to witness. If you ever watch a large alligator or crocodile high walk it’s impressive how massive they are. I could only imagine something that big walking with complete confidence that it’s an apex predator. Definitely would watch from a distance I’m sure it would shake you to the core to be ran down by one of them.
Between these guys and the Terror Birds it really seems like the South American archosaurs decided to form a Mesozoic tribute act during the so-called Age of Mammals...
Fun question to think of: would this class of crocodiliomorph have lips? Compared to modern crocodilians that rely on staying in water to hydrate their mouth/teeth, would these animals need lips to cover their teeth in “correct” was of artistically recreating them?
The history of land predators in Cenozoic South America is a strange one. For one, the fact that there were no real large land mammal predators until the hyperspecialized Thylacosmilus (deserves its own video) in the late Miocene, and even that wasn't much bigger than a large wolf or leopard; and it apparently went extinct in the Pliocene, supposedly long before large carnivorans made it to SA in the Pleistocene (but after the Great Interchange began). So why did it go extinct? Could be global cooling, or perhaps the first smaller carnivorans to arrive in the Pliocene ~5mya introduced some novel disease like distemper or scabies, or a combo? Why didn't it evolve larger? Some life-history feature of metatherians that prevent them from becoming larger carnivores, perhaps if they were relatively precocial & had to survive independently early? Competition from phorusrhacids/sebecids? Didn't stop large mammalian carnivores from evolving elsewhere... Secondly, the question of what happened to the Sebecids is probably due to global climate change, not local; the Andes had been high mountains for many 10s of millions of years, and we know globally climate sharply deteriorated after 13-10 mya (e.g. 10.1038/ngeo2813, other papers). The fact though that Purussaurus persisted into the latest Miocene is possibly because all the appropriate lowland sebecid habitat in the warm tropics was essentially swamp by the end Miocene, and prowled by Purussaurus. Or we just don't have the fossils of remnant Sebecidae. Finally, what role did the terror birds play in structuring animal communities? Did they actually tackle large prey, perhaps by attrition wounding? Or stick to prey smaller than themselves, like flying accipiters generally do? Did the largest SA mammals have any predators at all from birth to death, outside of the Amazon swamps, after the sebecids? Phorusrhacids too went extinct by end-Pliocene, despite being perhaps the only remaining large predators in SA. Especially by the Pliocene, and definitely by the Pleistocene if we believe large carnivorans didn't arrive until ~1mya, there seems to be a total absence of large predators in SA for at least a million years.
I would like to add that members of a sparassodont clade called Proborhyaenidae grew much larger than Thylacosmilus. Estimates of their size are as high as 150 kilograms, the same as a large female black bear. They also lived before the sebecids died out. While able to compete and perhaps outclass the likes Sebecus, or Langstonia they still had no chance of scaring off a species like Barinasuchus.
Some procyonids apparently arrived to South America roughly 7 million years ago likely through island hopping and some even managed to attain megafaunal size that could potentially competed with local sparassodonts Although there's no evidence that suggested that this early carnivora invaders might be responsible fot their extinction though
screw that episode of Walking with Beast, we need a prehistoric documentary or other paleo project that takes place in South Amarica back when it was an island continent.
Great info - thanks a lot for creating and sharing this content! BTW it took me a moment to understand that by "deep skull" you meant "high skull" - or am I still not getting it?
It's funny how when dinosaurs where discovered people thought they were giant terrestrial cocodrilian like iguanas, only to later on discover that we where off by just a couple million years.
It would only take for the planet to warm up just as it did in the creatacous and these guys could've became something truly terrifying. Something equal to the theropod dinosaurs or surpass them
These were cold-blooded crocodilian reptiles. The majority of dinosaurs were feathered and warm-blooded, making birds the successors instead. "Ecologically closer" is not an accepted factor in Taxonomy.
i highly doubt their teeth where that exposed tho, as they werent aquatic, or at least regarding the ones that werent. We already remade the dinosaurs models to fit this fact, and although it makes them look a lot like crocodilians to have the snaggletooth aesthetic, i think it should be applied to them too.
The rest of the world : Dog and Cat-like placental superpredators South America : What about Terror Birds, Crocodylomorphs and Metatherian superpredators ?
Australia was pretty weird as well. It was home to numerous strange marsupials, lands crocs such as Quinkana, gigantic monitor lizards like megalania, and even the terror bird-like dromornithids (although they may have been herbivores).
i wish there were more videos and documentaries like this about the early and mid Cenozoic creatures and the life before the Dinos from Precambrian to Triassic most of the prehistoric documentaries and videos that are around just go from dinosaurs then skip straight to the ice age and humans
Could you do a video on Dinocephalians? The not as popular Permian animals, since they never really got showcased in any popular media of the past much.
An informative video! A few constructive criticisms: 1. Especially, not "expecially" 2. The ending "dae" is pronounced "dee" not "day". Other than that, cool information. Thanks for sharing!
But tyrannosaurids did not have serrated blade like teeth, they have more conical, bone crushing teeth. Cacharadontosaurids like Giganotosaurus had serrated blade like teeth
This is going to be an unpopular opinion BUT the sebecids remind me more of the pseudosuchians that became the dominate land animals in the Triassic more than they do of true dinosaurs. There is strong evidence that Dinos were indeed warm blood, their posture, much like land mammals today was upright rather than the default sprawling gait we see in modern reptiles, dinos had the ability to produce feathers, lacked osteoderms (with some VERY notable exceptions, hello ankylosaurs!) their growth rates were little short of explosive and seemed to have developed a work-around to the turbinate bones endothermic animals need for heat regulation. It irks me when people lump in the pterosaurs and dinosaurs with modern day reptiles like lizards and tend to think of dinosaurs/pterosaurs as some form of jumped-up Komodo Dragon or Nile crocodile rather than what it truly was. I believe a better comparison to non-avian dinosaurs (in looks, appearance and behavior) are modern flightless birds such as emus, rheas, ostriches, the Red-legged Seriema, the terror birds of centuries long pass ( the Phorusrhacos) and the Cassowary. LIFE is precious, which is why I dabble in Paleontology and, in my opinion, past organisms were better adapted that what we give them credit for. More often than not, entire groups of animals became extinct not because something "better" came along but because of either a major catastrophe or the climate shifting bit and the rules for life on Earth changed. However, I'm an amateur, so feel free to correct me......
@@chimerasuchus think of it as a saurian inspired project but its Miocene South America instead of the Hell Creek Formation. Barinasuchus as Tyrannosaurus Langstoina(or some sort of sparassodont) as Dakotaraptor Purussaurus(or Megalodon) as Mosasaurus Giant Cingulates as Ankylosaurs Argentavis as Quetzalcoatlus and a lot more.
