Crocodile Die-Out In Wyoming 230 Million Years Ago

Once upon a time, big crocodiles roamed the Wyoming swamplands.

Wait, what?

Yeah, that was a thing some 230 million years ago.

Also, other crocodile and alligator-sized amphibians convened on a floodplain in what is now west-central Wyoming.

Then, they all died about the same time.

Over time, sediment covered their bodies, from wind-blown sand to volcanic ash.

That sand compressed into sandstone rock and further kept what was left of them hidden, until recently.

Mother Nature has been eroding away their tombs.

A paper was published April 2 in the journal PLOS One about the recent find of a fossil cache of these amphibians, called Buettnererpeton bakeri.

These primitive, four-legged amphibians lived in North America during the Triassic Period, between 201 million and 252 million years ago.

These metoposaurid temnospondyls, those are long words, were the ancestors of today’s salamanders, frogs, and toads.

The dig site called Nobby Knob is located in Dubois, Wyoming.

Paleontologists found the fossilized remains of at least 19 individuals, writes Live Science’s Skyler Ware

The bones are relatively undisturbed and lying the same way they were positioned when the animals died.

This suggests the amphibians perished in calm waters and were gently buried by layers of fine sediment over time.

Even “very delicate parts” of the creatures’ skeletons were preserved, according to a statement from the journal.

Paleontologists also found fossilized poop, plants and bivalve mollusks at the site.

“There are some articulated bones that are nearly absent in other metoposaurid bone beds in North America, and completely unknown for Buettnererpeton,” study co-authors Dave Lovelace and Aaron Kufner, who are both geoscientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tell Popular Science’s Andrew Paul.

So why the massive die-off?

They don't have a theory for that yet.

But, obviously, much has changed about Wyoming since the time it was a swamp to today.

Those changes are ongoing.

Who knows what Wyoming will look like in another million years.