The Real Godzilla and King Kong

Godzilla! That’s what they’re calling a brand new (though 135 million year old) species of crocodile found in fossil form in Patagonia, in the southern tip of South America. During the Jurassic Period, that region was submerged in a tropical bay and, as we now know, was home to one of the fiercest creatures to ever swim the seas. Though technically a crocodile, the Dakosaurus andiniensis differed greatly from our modern croc—and even more so from its contemporaries.
Measuring thirteen feet, the Dakosaurus had fish-like fins in place of feet, meaning that it never came on land like our modern crocodilians. Far stranger, though, was its head: whereas other crocodiles of the Jurassic Period had long, slender snouts and long thin teeth good for tossing back lots of little fish, the Dakosaurus’s head more closely resembled a Tyrannosaurus rex. Its snout was short and high, and its jaw spanned a foot and a half, full of huge, serrated teeth—the biggest ones reaching four inches, about the size of a width of your palm. Though there is no way to know for sure what the Dakosaurus ate, we can be sure it was big. Diego Pol, a researcher at the Mathematical Biosciences Institute and the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Ohio State University, said, “Dakosaurus probably fed on other large marine reptiles.” Although the Dakosaurus differed from other crocodiles in many ways and closely resembled some of the large, predatory land dinosaurs, there are sufficient similarities to be sure it was indeed a crocodile.. Pol says it is an example of convergent evolution, the process by which mostly unrelated organisms may acquire very similar characteristics even when evolving in different ecosystems. Pol worked with Zulma Gasparini of the National University at La Plata in Argentina. Their findings were published on November 10 in the online version of Science.
While Dakosaurus died out with the dinosaurs, the modern crocodile is a living testament to its lineage. Likewise do we see reflections of Gigantopithecus Blacki, the ten-foot tall, 1,200-pound primate which some call King Kong, in today’s gorillas and orangutans. The only remains of the Gigantopithecus we have are the fossils of three jawbones and close to a thousand teeth—some collected at digs and some collected from Chinese apothecary shops, who sell “dragon bones,” or fossils, for their believed curative properties. However, much can be approximated from just teeth and jawbones. Using an average head-to-body ratio of the modern orangutan and Australopithecus afarensis (“Lucy”), a one-inch wide molar becomes a ten-foot ape. Other than the size, our visual of Giantopithecus is more-or-less speculative, but one thing is for sure—the 1,200-pound ape was not a tree-dweller like the orangutan. For that reason scientists generally agree that its body would have more closely resembled that of the earthbound gorilla.
Now one other thing is for sure: The Gigantopithecus walked the earth at the same time and in the same regions as did early humans. Using an extremely precise dating method which uses electron spin resonance to determine the age of organic material, geochronologist and associate professor at McMaster University Jack Rink recently discovered that Gigantopithecus roamed southern China for nearly a million years—up until 100,000 years ago, when the species became extinct. During this time span that region was also host to the human race, as it was undergoing important evolutionary changes. In fact, one theory is that the early humans contributed to the Gigantopithecus’s demise: the giant ape, man, and a now-extict giant panda are all thought to have been consumers of bamboo. The giant ape and panda wanted it for food, and man wanted it for tools. With a less voracious appetite but a more resourceful brain, us humans apparently won the competition. For my part, I’m just glad we don’t compete for food with giant squids.