40-foot crocodile makes its way to Oklahoma

By Christian Price, News9.com INsite Team

NORMAN, Okla. -- A 110-million-year-old dinosaur-eating crocodile is on exhibit at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.

SuperCroc is part of a summer long exhibit produced by Project Exploration. The specimen on display was found in 1997 by Paul Sereno, a Paleontologist at the University of Chicago.

"We were just amazed," Sereno said. "Even when a portion of the skull is sticking out of the ground, it's the size of the largest skull of any dinosaur. It's a T-Rex size skull, and you just have to be amazed."

Scientist found 80 percent of the fossil making reconstruction easy. SuperCroc is twice as long as modern living crocodiles.

"When you scale up an animal like this, and you go back and look at the size of its rib cage, it's eight times the weight," Sereno said. "We think that it weighed maybe as much as eight tons."

No other dinosaur preyed on SuperCroc.

"There's no natural predator when this guy was healthy," Sereno said. "Only when he was down one leg, then the other guys would come get him."

The Science of SuperCroc exhibit will be at the Noble Museum of Natural History until Aug. 24. For more information, call (405) 325-4712 or log on to www.snomnh.ou.edu .