Life took yet another little detour this weekend as Tito once again worked through a crisis. His gums and tongue were pale, he refused food and water, and he was listless and could hardly stand. The vet said he was bleeding internally somewhere, but since he didn’t show distress at all, just weakness, I thought I’d give him just one more day for all the great doggy dreams he seemed to be having. And damn if he didn’t start drinking Sunday night. Monday he took solid food, and today we walked a good half-mile together in a local park. He was slow of course, but really enjoyed himself, rolling in and eating the snow, peeing on every bush in sight, and even trying to solicit play from another dog a mere 12 years old. As hard as he is on my sleep and work, he’s inspiring.

Last week, see here and here and here, there was a paper published about a new and bizarre species of early crocodile relative (poposaur) that was found in a plaster-jacketed slab of fossilized bone from New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch quarry. It had been at the American Museum of Natural History in New York for decades. Named Effigia, this little (6-foot) late Triassic animal was toothless and a biped!

Since I was up much of the night anyway Friday and Saturday, I thought that even though Effigia lived well outside the time-frame that Olduvai was dedicated to, I’d try a little reconstruction based on the bone and skull drawings available on-line. Here’s the result.

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That reminded me of an early Cretaceous vegetarian crocodile from Mongolia’s Gobi desert that I painted for Discover magazine back in 1997. Here’s that little acrylic piece.

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The animal is called Chimerosuchus, and was small (3-foot), terrestrial, and long-legged. It also sported four spatulate “buck” teeth. I was lucky with this painting in that I had one of the world’s experts on fossil crocodiles as my guide. In fact it was Han-Dieter Sues who had solved the question of exactly what group the little creature belonged to. As with Effigia, it was the unique structure of the ankle that was the first clue.

Today, crocodilians fill only a small amount of the ecological space that they occupied at various times in the past. All are ambush predators, scavengers, or fish eaters today. Two of the most unusual are the gavial or gharial (Gavialis gangeticus) and the false gavial (Tomistoma schlegelii). As the common names indicate, the long and narrow jaws of these two crocodiles were thought to be the result of convergent evolution. Genetic and new morphological studies however show them to have a common narrow-snouted ancestor.

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This digital illustration was the cover of the June 2003 issue of the journal Systematic Biology. A detail of the gavial’s head shows that it was one of my earlier attempts with Photoshop.

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The original was done at 600 dpi and was an enormous file. It needed to be as I actually counted thousands of scales from about 30 different photos and scientific drawings to make sure my animals were accurate. I also had to change my layout rather late in the process, because the initial measurements I had for the cover were wrong (my fault). Tomistoma was rising to take a small animal from the surface of the water and I had to leave the victim off.

For a brief but well-written look at Croc evolution and that unique ankle joint, take this link to Tim McDonald’s (afarensis) ” Transitions” site.

The Florida Museum of Natural History has a wonderful site on all the living Crocodilian species. I’ve linked the pages of the two featured in my painting, but here is a link to the introduction page. Lots of information.