Carnufex: The Prehistoric Carolina Butcher and the Origins of Crocodylomorpha

[@gattycroc8073]

crocodylomorphs are such an underrated group of prehistoric creatures and I hope lesser-known species get the attention they deserve.

[@jaystreet46]

Underrated by whom? Because every video I’ve seen speaks on their badassery…

[@jeremiahalguire8231]

​@jaystreet46 they're not really well known to most mainstream people. I believe that's what they meant by that. You're right , they were super badass ......but ask almost anyone you meet in daily life anything about them and I'll bet you get just a blank stare.

[@scambammer6102]

I didn't even know there was a rating system

[@jaystreet46]

@@jeremiahalguire8231 yes you’re right but the same could be said about most prehistoric life, but anyone who is in the know knows how badass they are

[@jeremiahalguire8231]

@jaystreet46 yeah , you prob could.....however , we were merely talking about crocodylomorphs. But thanks.

[@Afrologist]

Been studying the Triassic-Jurassic transition for my next stream & honestly it's pretty sad how understudied Crocodylomorphs are as a clade due to just how few remains of them that we have to work with. I suspect that everything from their phylogeny to paleoart will be completely transformed once we start learning more about them.

[@DemitriVladMaximov]

I had no idea that North Carolina had Triassic fossils. This is amazing news.

[@personnelproton]

I mean, the Appalachians are some of the oldest mountains on Earth.

[@AustinThomasPhD]

The primary Triassic basin covers parts of Anson, Chatham, Durham, Granville, Lee, Montgomery, Moore, Orange, Richmond, Union, and Wake counties. Smaller basins are further West. Quite a few fossils are known from the Pekin formation.

[@jamesabernethy7896]

I probably haven't commented nearly enough on your channel but these videos are so interesting. Very well presented with the narration and some great visuals. Engaging, clear and informative.

[@mymom1462]

thanks chimerasuchus for another banger video.

[@TanupatYT]

Been waiting for the remake on this!

[@bibia666]

It's always a good day when CHimerasuchus uploads a video 👍 Thanks 🙏 Greetings bibia 👋

[@thelaughinghyenas8465]

A very good video on an extraordinary point in evolution and a great narration. Thank you.

[@TheAnimalKingdom-tq3sz]

When everyone needed him the most, He returned!

[@libraryofpangea7018]

Great presentation as always Chimera, thank you for your hard work & effort.

[@adamadams5123]

Always look forward to your next bravo!

[@hoibsh21]

Great vid, yr peakin !

[@courtney_bert]

This is amazing! Great as always dude ❤❤❤😊

[@fiodarkliomin1112]

Thank you for your job 🙏

[@mlggodzilla1567]

Another great video 😎

[@patmcgroin6916]

Carnufex, the Carolina Butcher! What a great name for a pro wrestler, lol... Another great video. Triassic, the age of the crocs.

[@rileyernst9086]

It's pretty striking with he lacrimal crest and long triangular snout. Given that rauisuchids and the earlier erythrihrosuchids have similar shaped boxier skulls I wonder if Carnufex was doing something a bit differently. Maybe it wasn't going for raw biting power?

[@HassanMohamed-jy4kk]

I’ve got some great ideas and some great suggestions for you to make KZbin Videos Shows about some more Prehistoric Extinct Crocodilian Species, such as Lazarussuchus, Plesiosuchus, and Metriorynchus adding that to your collection on the next Chimerasuchus coming up next!!👍👍👍👍👍⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[@chancegivens9390]

Crocodylomorphs are an amazing group of animals. I gotta make a good amount of these beasts into figurines in the future.

[@sauraplay2095]

A very amazing animal! Thank you!

[@alexandermorrison1010]

Appreciate the re-upload and the additional information. As for the brief description of the antorbital fenestra for these animals it made me pause to at least bring attention to this feature. I have seen little explanation about the particular loss of the feature, at least here upon KZbin. So I have made a short video highlighting the absence of this ancestral archosaur trait and the most likely reason for its loss at least for Neosuchian crocodylomorphs. I do not mean to plug my content here on your video, just figured it could be something of interest for anyone else who may be curious.

[@AifDaimon]

Love that most of these ancient croc-adjacent species converged on similar body plans, diets & lifestyles to both theropods and modern marine mammals

[@AntoekneeDE]

Thanks, this was a concise and valuable introduction to a massive milestone in crocodilian evolution, I especially appreciated the analysis of its inferred metabolism. It irks me when the extant crocs are portrayed as living fossils harking to the misty swampy depths of time when the group was so varied and dynamic, and it’s metabolic history and coronary layout to me think that we should be considering Crocs as reptiles no more than we do the other living archosaurs, not because they’re not reptiles (in the same way that we’re also all terrestrial fish, but because it’s not helpful to consider these creatures as being most akin to lizards and snakes despite archosaurs having split off that line somewhere in the Permian, if not early Triassic.

[@stefanostokatlidis4861]

Everyone is hellbent on distancing every other reptile lineage from squamates nowadays. Probably it started when it became widely known that dinosaurs had higher metabolism, then it mixed with anti-squamate bias and ophidiophobia, and we reach the situation of today. I have heard proposals from others that even turtles shouldn’t be considered true reptiles. In an obscure blog, I have read about the conspiracy theory of a hairy turtle in the Triassic. A lot of those people tend to forget the great lizard diversity, as well as the fact that some lizards,like the monitor lizards, convergently evolved archosaur traits. Also mosasaurs and palaeophiid snakes may have had a higher metabolism than the standard lizards of today. On the flipside, if birds were completely extinct, we would have categorized them as another weird type of reptile, just like pterosaurs. So is reptile a category of metabolism that animals can get out or into?

[@AntoekneeDE]

@@stefanostokatlidis4861 I have read a few articles, particularly regarding the monitor lizards and signs of increased intelligence through problem-solving as well as clever tricks to accelerating metabolism, but I have no personal bias against other creature groups, they're ALL incredibly fascinating and wonderful creatures. Shared features such as raised metabolism across groups do not make for new combined groups, alone. I believe part of the question with turtles was initially to do with whether they were anapsid rather than diapsid or synapsid amniotes however this has been largely disproven I believe? The reason I would except Crocs and feel they deserve their own major classification is because their split with the rest of their reptile relatives was at exactly at the same time, in the same creatures, as it was for their nearest relatives, the birds, which do get their own classification. A Croc is more similar / closely related to a parrot or a penguin than it is to a tortoise, a tuatara or a tiger chameleon. The Croc lineage was hugely diverse and rivalled the Dinosaurs themselves for bipedalism, quadrupedalism, herbivory, carnivory and adopted semi and near-fully aquatic lifestyles multiple times (which the dinosaurs didn't , but we'll give them the air instead). The major thing I feel separates them from the rest of reptiles today is the four-chambered heart, and whilst other creatures including fish have some clever ways of achieving ectothermy or homeothermy, mesothermy or localised endothermy, I may be wrong, but I do not believe anything other than birds and mammals, and their ancestors and nearest relatives are known to have performed the feat in the same way? This active endothermy is considered a defining characteristic of both of those extant groups. Although crocs may no longer have this trait, they have had it in the past and subsequently evolved to circumvent it which in itself is fascinating and worthy of further study, but no other creature classified as a reptile has been through that same biological change to the same active thermoregulation (let alone back again), and furthermore, when it did occur in the ancestors of crocs, it was in fact in the same ancestral stock as the dinosaurs and birds. Ultimately, any classification is arbitrary, otherwise we can as easily do away with reptiles and synapsids and just have amniotes, or terrestrial quadrupeds and so on and on, but my feeling here is that the archosaurs form a very unique group, and we do not consider birds to be reptiles despite sharing the same origin at the same time, similarly unique circulatory systems, and a wealth of diversity within the group, and I feel the reason Crocs get badged as reptiles is purely based on their appearance and lack of endothermy today.

[@stefanostokatlidis4861]

@@AntoekneeDE where do we draw the line though, now that turtles have been put closer to archosaurs rather than lizards? We don’t know exactly how much endothermic those reptiles were, because they may have had endothermic features, but the early Mesozoic climate was much warmer than today. Conceivably an animal would have functioned as an endotherm on the point that it solved the Carrier’s constraint, just by putting smaller improvements like the four-chambered heart. Modern monitors for example have a functionally four-chambered heart. There was a paper that was published, I think one year ago, that posited that all amniotes are ancestrally endothermic, that modern reptiles are a reversal and that crocodilians are a double reversal. It posited that ventricular separation is governed by simple regulatory processes in development, and that it is easy for an organism to evolve either way. Although it wasn’t fully accepted, it is still food for thought. Another 2023 paper recalibrated synapsid endothermy from the Permian to the early Jurassic, at the crown of mammals. They put precise endothermy, full solution of the Carrier’s constraint and high aerobic capacity only into the Cenozoic, concurrent with climate cooling and opening of forests. This seems true, as even today older mammalian clades in the tropics still retain ectothermic features. I am trying to say that it isn’t as easy to attribute endothermy in ancient animals, and this endothermy shouldn’t necessarily be like modern birds and large boreal placental mammals. Birds for example are highly specialised for flight and operate at the limits of their metabolism constantly. This is a great burden on them, and whenever there is an opportunity to change lifestyle, they tone down their metabolism. I think that the issue has been solved by using the term sauropsids. Most paleontologist use sauropsids, however, most herpetologists still use reptiles even for birds.

[@stefanostokatlidis4861]

@@AntoekneeDE also, I think that separating taxonomic entities based on the time of divergence is very tricky. Tuatara and lizards split from each other around the same time as crocs and birds, yet we don’t call them very different entities today. Taxonomy is both a matter of divergence times, but also a matter of tradition.

[@chimerasuchus]

Birds are reptiles. They have merely changed greatly from the ancestral reptilian condition, just as crocodilians have changed greatly from the first archosaurs.

[@rexyjp1237]

That thing looks like godzilla without his dorsal plates.

[@dunkleosteusyaetuanalien]

Wow monster prehistoric

[@nightshadeentertainment6568]

Can we get a Rutiodon Video please?

[@joeshmoe8345]

Thanks

[@trainertealvgc2267]

That’s such a cool name

[@maozilla9149]

nice

[@chir0pter]

I can't wrap my head around how these bipedal pseudosuchians would have looked walking...small limbs, long heavy bodies and tails, flat feet, short toes...just not something we have any parallel to today!

[@hoibsh21]

Looks like the Carnufex has a lot to say.

[@RooMan93]

Respect to this boi, he invented Crocodiles

[@amedeeabreo7334]

I love the shere density of unpronounce-able nomenclature contained herein.

[@dairydregone7146]

I have a question. If we brought a T-Rex into modern-day America would the T-Rex be considered an invasive species? But how could it be when it's native to America?

[@chimerasuchus]

The ecosystems of the continent have changed many times over since the end of the Cretaceous Period , so it would be an invasive species. The fauna of today simply haven't evolved to deal with it.

[@42ZaphodB42]

Everything that's not part of the current "original" ecosystem is invasive. That includes past species. But it's an interesting and also complicated topic since ecosystems change constantly.

[@stefanlaskowski6660]

​@@chimerasuchusThe majority of native animals that would be suitably large for a T-Rex to eat could probably outrun it. Cows might be the exception. Well, and humans.

[@slipstreamxr3763]

@@42ZaphodB42 Also adding to the fact that almost every species on the planet has been invasive to another species at some point. With the exception of highly isolated habitats like islands, many of these invasions were not caused by people, but were animals being animals. Bison, mammoths and bears were at one point all invasive species to America and same goes for paleo horses crossing Beringia into Asia. Jaguars and lions once roamed across both the Americas 12,00 years ago, but now both lions and jaguars would be considered invasive in many areas that were once their former territory.

[@stefanostokatlidis4861]

Horses have been missing from America for a couple of thousand years, and where they got unwittingly returned by Europeans, people weren’t happy about this. There was also a proposal of bringing camels to the American Southwest, but it failed. People dislike them and shot even all the few feral ones. Camels were native to North America too. Imagine a completely different animal in the modern ecosystem.

[@ger5956]

They found a Tyranid on earth? 😱

[@jacobdalland1390]

So we have a fossil crocodylomorph called the Carolina Butcher, and a pepper called the Carolina Reaper. The Carolinas need to chill! 😜

[@scambammer6102]

In my mind, I'm gone to Carolina Can't you see the sunshine? Can't you just feel the moonshine? Ain't it just like a friend of mine to hit me from behind When I'm gone to Carolina in my mind...

[@shockdrake]

Crocodile is genetically closer to Seymouria or Lion?

[@grahamstrouse1165]

Let’s be honest-This guy looks like a dude in a giant lizard suit…

[@Yokomation]

rather then calling crocodilles Living Fossils, i feel like it´s Better to just call them Retired Badass, While thier cusions were mainly warm blooded and active animals, they returned to a Cold blooded life style.

[@masterwellesley]

So this where a tyranid unit name from

[@barrybarlowe5640]

Looking at their known data, there is an awful lot of speculation in their reconstruction.

[@ConFon-ut8ri]

GOD ❤

[@Alsayid]

Why would crocodillians, and many predatory dinosaurs that followed, become bipedal?

[@TeethToothman]

🫀🖤🫀

[@N238E]

Carnifex is a band.

[@scambammer6102]

also a movie

[@Iceican]

did you quit voicing your videos entirely?

[@smashtoad]

We found 7 bones, here's what it looked like. Hilarious.

[@michaelmaxim7207]

Pure speculation.