First off all the pictures and music in this book belong to their respective owners.
I always was a fan of the PRIMEVAL series.
And that made me think, what if there were more cases of creatures traveling through anomalies. This is a book that answe...
Purussaurus was a giant caiman that swam the waterways of South America during the early to late Miocene 20.4 to 5.3 million years ago.
Purussaurus' skull was 145,3 centimeters or 57.2 inches long and had a bite force of around 5.3 metric tons. Unlike many other species of Crocodilians, Purussaurus' snout was noticeably shorter and wider.
There are actually three different species of Purussaurus: Brasiliensis, Neivensis and Mirandia. The first one being the largest of the three, is able to grow around 10.3 meters or 34 feet long. But this isn't fully reliable as the only very well preserved fossils of Purussaurus are their skulls.
Finally it appears that Purussaurus would have been the apex predator of its environment, being able to feed on whatever it wanted. Even the many species of enormous Ground Sloths would have been on the menu for this colossal caiman.
Neivensis
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Diet: Small to large creatures.
Casualties: None.
Purussaurus wasn't the only Crocodilian roaming the swamps of South America during the Miocene. Mourasuchus is one such example.
It lived throughout the northern range of South America 15.97 to 7.25 million years ago during the middle to late Miocene period.
Just like Purussaurus, there were multiple different species of Mourasuchus, those species being Amazonensis, Atopus, Arendis and Pattersoni.
Just like the two other species of caimans that are featured in this episode, Mourasuchus was massive, with the largest species being able to grow to be 11 meters or 36 feet long.
Mourasuchus had a long and flat snout that resembled a duck's bill. But what made Mourasuchus stand out even more was that it seemed to have been a filter feeder. This way of feeding would have insured that Mourasuchus didn't have to compete with any of the other species of Crocodilians that it coexisted with it.
Atopus
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Diet: Microscopic organisms, pieces of drifting meat and small invertebrates.
