@munstrumridcully Machimossurus is a crocodilomorph, but Phytosaurs are even further removed, their currently basal crutarsans, so on the croc side of the bird/croc split but at it's very base.
@@Freshie207 I find the taxonomic classification -- or phylogeny and nested clades I guess they would call it now --of prehistoric life so fascinating! Thank you for the info and the reply, I really appreciate it! 🙂🙂🙂
Funny how the crocodilian phenotype is so useful that it reincarnates time and time again. It makes one wonder if life-forms will develop similarly on other planets. Edit: I made the comment less redundant.
The audio quality is much, much better. Thinking of size variations among phytosaurs I couldn't help making a comparison to size variations among modern cobras - in the sense that the largest of them, the king cobra, primarily preys on other, smaller. snakes. It's always annoyed me that palaeontologists make the assumption that a large predator in the past automatically preyed on large animals. I mean, predators in the modern world don't conform to that idea in every case. And you have to factor in the energy expended versus the energy gained. A predator expends an enormous amount of energy at great personal risk to subdue and kill a large animal. Then there's the challenge of getting into the body of the prey to eat the easily gobbled down internal organs before either competition from your own species or scavengers show up. And I personally think a long thin jaw is hardly suited for bringing down four legged prey - on land - who would writhe, bite and kick and gouge back. If modern palaeontologists had discovered fossilized gorilla-like animals from the Triassic well, instantly they would be depicted as violent carnivores locked in death struggles with big quadrupeds, as opposed to peaceful vegetarians.
You are right but I think Paleontologist are aware of all of that. It just means that they could potentially and preferentially prey on same size or bigger animals, but of course did not let a small (easier) meal escape. Bite marks, embedded teeth, bone fractures indicates that large carnivores preyed on large animals. And I think that they can also tell the diet of an animal looking at the teeth regarding the gorilla example ;). Just like they wrongly named Phytosaurs believing they were herbivorous (phyto) when discovering the first teeth.
All good points. Even the gorilla example has merit. However, they dont just speculate and there is evidence for most hypotheses. For example dentition would generally rule out classing an herbivore as a carnivore. Yes gorillas look scary, but any experienced researcher would figure out they spend all day chewing vegetation when they inspect their teeth. Point taken though and some hypotheses do seem too narrow and forced. When some people were amazed at evidence that TRex ALSO scavenged, to me it felt like, "well yeah, what wild animal do we know that passes up free food?"
I suggest a video about Nochnitsa geminidens, a well-preserved gorgonopsid that displays adaptations for a nocturnal lifestyle, next. Gorgonopsids are extremely overlooked to begin with, and even when they do get attention, it’s always Inostrancevia that steals the limelight from other less well-known but equally interesting members of its clade.
Amazing, and this is by no means the end of discoveries. We have this much knowledge, could you imagine what was not fossilized? The worlds known to us were far more complex in reality of flora and fauna that has existed. Let your imagination conceive of the diversity which flourished millions of years ago.
Man if dinosaurs never existed or at least had not dominated the planet our prehistoric past might have been filled with a multitude of bizarre croc like species.
Sound quality is much better. I thought was you, it sounded like you didn't move your jaw when you spoke and then the accent. Like some chick whispering through a smile in line at Starbucks to her friend like OMG, look at the guy in the front of the line. I still here what sounds like a pretty still jaw with minimal pronunciation, but it works just fine with this quality of sound.
Interesting that phytosaurs straddle the border of archosaurimorph/archosaur being a sister group to all archosaurs or at the bottom branch of the pseudosuchian lineage in archosauria
Great video covering these extinct creatures! I didn't know anything about these animals before I watched this video! Also, the audio quality was great here too! 😉👍
While I find paleontology fascinating, and the history of the crocodilomorphs and especially of the crocodile cousins-the phytosaurs-is evolutionarily important, your condescending, smug narrative voice is quite distracting when one attempts to enjoy your otherwise well-researched and informative videos. For a while you wisely experimented with having another narrator for your videos. That was a superb idea. I think-or at least hope-you don’t *intend* to sound so arrogant; it seems to be inadvertent. Yet you should *respect your audience,* many of whom are fellow paleontologists themselves, individuals with doctoral-level specialisations about which you know very little, or individuals well-read in paleontology and evolutionary history. Humility is the best way to build *community* with an audience.
Good video. i have heard of large crocodilians from time of dinosaurs like deinosuchus but i never heard of the those Amphibious predators. This is a very interesting video I'm glad you showed it. I learned a lot from it.
