In northern New Mexico, among red rocks, fine dust and hills that seem baked in the oven, an animal has emerged that greatly ruins the comfortable idea we have of crocodiles. Because when we think of a crocodile we immediately imagine the short body, the short legs, the mouth full of teeth, that look of a living fossil that has found an effective formula and has decided to remain faithful to it forever. Then it arrives Labrujasuchus expectatus and it messes everything up: it stood on two legs, had tiny arms, a beak instead of teeth and, seen from afar, would have resembled a prehistoric ostrich or a small, slender dinosaur rather than a distant relative of crocodiles.
The new fossil comes from Ghost Ranchan area of New Mexico also famous for the landscapes painted by Georgia O’Keeffe and, above all, for its Triassic deposits. Here, for decades, paleontologists have been digging up remains of animals that lived over 200 million years ago, when dinosaurs were just starting to make their way and the planet still seemed busy trying out shapes, legs, snouts and strategies as if in a laboratory left open at night. The site of the discovery is the Hayden Quarrya fossiliferous quarry that continues to yield fragments of that ancient world.
A crocodile out of place
The name alone seems to have come out of a gothic tale with sand in your shoes. Labrujasuchus combines “la bruja”, meaning “the witch” in Spanish, with the Greek term linked to crocodile. The reference comes from an old name associated with Ghost Ranch, “Ranchos de los Brujos”, the witches’ ranch. Expectatusinstead, tells of an expectation: scholars suspected that an intermediate form must exist between two already known relatives, found in the same region but at different time levels. The fossil arrived right there, in the empty space of evolutionary history, like a relative who had been invited to a family dinner for years and finally appeared at the door.
The animal lived approximately 212 million years agoin the Upper Triassic, in a world very different from the current one. The area we now call New Mexico was then closer to the equator, with environments marked by rivers, sediments, fires, climatic instability and a fauna that mixed primitive dinosaurs, armored reptiles, aquatic predators and relatives of crocodiles with shapes decidedly less predictable than modern ones. In that context, Labrujasuchus belonged to the shuvosauridsa group of archosaurs connected to the evolutionary line of crocodiles, despite having an appearance capable of throwing any Sunday afternoon documentary mental figurine into crisis.
The most curious point lies right here: Labrujasuchus was not a dinosaur. Its body, however, closely imitated that of ornithomimosaurs, Cretaceous dinosaurs with a light profile, long legs and a runner’s gait, often described as “ostrich-like”. Except that the ornithomimosaurs would arrive much later. Here we are faced with a crocodile relative who, millions of years earlier, had already taken a similar path: slender body, bipedal posture, reduced forelimbs, toothless beak.
The beak instead of teeth
The mouth is perhaps the most surprising detail. In modern crocodiles, the teeth are almost as much a part of the character as the tail and the water-level eyes. They serve to block, hold, lacerate. Labrujasuchus had chosen completely different paraphernalia: a beak without teeth. A solution that has appeared several times in nature in very distant evolutionary lines, from birds to some dinosaurs, passing through ancient marine reptiles. Evolution, when it finds a useful form, tends to present it again with a certain insistence, like those clothes that come back into fashion every twenty years and someone pretends to have invented them all over again.
The question of diet remains open. Shuvosaurids are often linked to a more varied diet than the classic image of the predatory reptile: plants, perhaps small animals, materials collected or torn from the ground. That beak could be used to cut, pinch, tear parts of plants, collect food with precision. The bones available, for now, tell a lot about the shape of the animal and its place in the family tree, much less about the daily menu. It’s a shame, because the idea of a “crocodile” grazing or pecking around, with two operational little legs and arms reduced almost to decoration, would deserve at least one well-done animated scene.
The fossil described by scholars includes one partial skeletontogether with other materials recovered from the same quarry and probably linked to the same animal. In paleontology it often takes much less to change a piece of the map. A femur, a vertebra, a fragment of the pelvis can move a species, fill a void, confirm a hypothesis. Here the framework is solid enough to give a name to a new species and insert it into an already strange family.
Same idea, over and over again
The story of Labrujasuchus expectatus is mainly about convergent evolutionthat phenomenon whereby animals without a close relationship end up resembling each other because they face similar problems with similar solutions. Sharks and dolphins are mentioned often: one is a cartilaginous fish, the other a mammal, yet the water has sculpted both into streamlined shapes. With Labrujasuchus the game is even more fun, because the similarity concerns a relative of crocodiles and ostrich-like dinosaurs, distant lines that found a light, bipedal body structure advantageous.
Walking on two legs, in that world, could offer real advantages: greater speed, more efficiency in movement, ability to move in open environments, perhaps a different way of looking for food. The authors of the study read this as an important signal: in the Triassic many strategies that we associate with more recent animals were already taking shape, sometimes in groups destined to disappear. Evolution tries, discards, repeats, insists. Some roads become highways. Others remain paths interrupted under meters of rock.
The beautiful thing, and a little annoying for our need for order, is that the ancient relatives of crocodiles were much more varied than the crocodiles we know today. The current image of the family is narrow, heavy, aquatic or semi-aquatic, with powerful jaws and armored bodies. In the Triassic, however, that evolutionary line had produced terrestrial, slender, bipedal, toothless, even dinosaur-like forms. It almost seems like a taxonomic mockery: you look at the animal, you think “dinosaur”, then the family tree comes along with the red pen and corrects you.
Ghost Ranch keeps talking
Ghost Ranch has a long history in North American paleontology. It is famous for the remains of Coelophysisone of the best known primitive carnivorous dinosaurs, and for deposits capable of conserving entire pieces of Triassic ecosystems. Inside those rocks dinosaurs, reptiles, fish, relatives of animals destined to fly, bizarre species and shapes that always seem on the verge of contradicting a manual have been found. The work in the Hayden Quarry has lasted for about twenty years and each new campaign adds details to a period in which dinosaurs were starting to occupy space, without yet being the absolute masters of the scene.
Of course, the “witch crocodile” label works very well and will make all those who love prehistoric animals happy with a movie nickname. But behind the name there is a more serious question: the line that leads to modern crocodiles, before narrowing into the forms we know, crossed a very wide range of possibilities. Some even seemed successful. Shuvosaurids lasted millions of years, so Labrujasuchus wasn’t a whim of nature gone awry. It was part of an experiment successful enough to leave strong traces. Now it has a name. And he still seems to laugh at our schemes.
