“The modern Amazon River basin contains the world’s richest biota, but the origins of this extraordinary diversity are really poorly understood,” said John Flynn, Frick Curator of Fossil Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History and an author on the paper. “Because it’s a vast rain forest today, our exposure to rocks–and therefore, also to the fossils those rocks may preserve–is extremely limited. So anytime you get a special window like these fossilized “mega-wetland” deposits, with so many new and peculiar species, it can provide novel insights into ancient ecosystems. And what we’ve found isn’t necessarily what you would expect.”

 

Just Thirteen million years ago, at least seven different species of crocodile roamed the swamps of northeastern Peru.  The details are in Science Daily, with the original paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.  Today, the Amazon basin is teeming in life.  This rich biota has it origins in the massive wetland system that existed about 10 million years ago.  Interestingly, at that time, the area, which was an interconnected system of lakes, embayments, swamps, and rivers, drained northward into the Caribbean.  The paper describes seven crocodile species, three new to science.