Stomatosuchus Wild Roar Jurassic World Survival Review

Stomatosuchus inermis (meaning “weaponless mouth crocodile”) was a giant stomatosuchid neosuchian crocodyliform that lived during the Late Cretaceous, approximately 100 to 94 million years ago, in the Bahariya Formation of what is now Egypt’s Western Desert. It reached an estimated 10 metres (33 feet) in length and weighed an estimated 2 to 3 tonnes. It shared its ecosystem with Spinosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus and Paralititan, in the marshy deltaic lowlands of what was then the southern coast of the Tethys Sea. Its name combines the Greek stoma (mouth) with suchus, a reference to the Egyptian crocodile god Sobek.

Its most distinctive feature was the flat, lid-like skull with a long broad snout lined with hundreds of small conical teeth on the upper jaw. The lower jaw may have been toothless and is thought to have supported a large throat pouch similar to a pelican’s, leading scientists to suggest it was a filter feeder scooping up fish and other small prey. Exactly what it ate remains unknown.

What makes Stomatosuchus particularly tragic in the history of paleontology is that the only known fossil — a large skull collected by German paleontologist Ernst Stromer during his Egyptian expedition in the early 20th century — was housed in the Munich natural history museum and destroyed on the night of 24 April 1944, when Allied bombing raids damaged the building. The original Spinosaurus specimen was lost the same night. All scientific knowledge of Stomatosuchus now rests entirely on Stromer’s original descriptions, drawings and notes.

Known only from Stromer’s drawings and notes after the original fossil was destroyed in 1944, Stomatosuchus inermis remains one of the most mysterious and tantalising prehistoric crocodilians ever discovered.