Very longtime Musings readers will remember I had a lovely autumnal trip to Mexico back in 2008. While I traveled around a bit, this was based at the Museo del Desierto in Coahulia. I still have friends there, and indeed one before I went – Héctor Rivera-Sylva was doing his MSc in Bristol when I started my PhD and we’ve been in touch ever since. In fact we have just had a paper accepted on some local (to him) dinosaur specimens. More of that soon, but today I’m looking towards Héctor’s most recent project on Deinosuchus.
As big and badass crocs of the Mesozoic go, Deinosuchus seems to play second fiddle to Sarcosuchus. Despite the impressive size of the latter, it’s hard not to look at it and think that the skull is at least superficially gharial-like and really rather narrow for much of it’s length. Deinosuchus on the other hand appears to have both sheer size and a real set of ‘proper’ crocodilian chompers.
Héctor has described some new Deinosuchus material from Coahuila (shown above) and clearly they felt it was time to give this animal it’s dues. So Héctor and the rest of the prep team at the museum set about creating a mount for display and it was unveiled just recently. He’s been sharing his photos online and was kind enough to let me grab a few of them to post up here. As you can see there are in fact two, a whole body one and then a front half that lunges from the water at a rather blasé Tyrannosaurus.
What is perhaps more interesting for some is the construction process of these mounts and not being one to write one post when I can eke two out of it, they will be following tomorrow.
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