Fascination has been an eternal human attribute, especially, when it comes to the exploration of the old and extinct. Adding one more chapter to the book of jaw-dropping archaeological discoveries, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment in Thailand brought to light the fossilized remains of a hitherto unknown creature, the Alligator munensis, also lovingly christened as the Mun River Alligator. The earth cradling this extinct species for a colossal duration of 230,000 years, this discovery has indeed sent a ripple of surprise shimmering across the realm of herpetology.
The skeletal remains of the ancient alligator crawled out of their centuries-old burrow in the Non Sung district of Nakhon Ratchasima in northern Thailand. About 300 kilometers northeast of Thailand’s bustling capital city of Bangkok, this ground-breaking revelation was a brilliant contribution to the scientific worlds by a team of arduously working researchers from the University of Tübingen, Germany, and the Department of Mineral Resources and Chulalongkorn University. They excavated and studied every vestige of the fossil, ranging from the skull to the jaws and everything in between.
Despite the Non Sung fish pond being the area of focus, the pickaxes could only unearth bone fragments unsuitable for studying. However, it was a nearly perfect alligator skull fossil, revealing its secrets under the scrutinizing gaze of the scientists, that led to the understanding that this was no everyday discovery but a new species that roamed the earth around 230,000 years ago during the Middle Pleistocene period. The alligator was christened in honor of the closeby flowing Mun River and thus, recorded in history as the Mun River Alligator (photo credit to KhaoSod English).
The Mun River alligator is distinguished by its broader, shorter snout, and a higher skull. The location of the nostrils further away from the snout’s tip and fewer, larger tooth sockets, point to an adapted mechanism ideal for feasting on crustaceans and freshwater molluscs. The alligator size, inferred from the size of the excavated skull, suggests the creature to have been approximately 1-2 meters long.
What adds another layer of allure to this discovery is the astonishing fact that currently, only two alligator species are known to exist globally – the American Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) and the Chinese Alligator (Alligator sinensis). Observations made during this study reflect shocking similarities between the cranial features of the extinct Mun River alligator and the Chinese alligator, hinting at a shared lineage between them that lived in the Yangtze and Mekong-Chaophraya basins.
Geologists hypothesize that the uplift of the Tibetan plateau might have been the trigger for the geomorphic evolution leading to the divergence of the ancestral species into these distinct populations. It eventually fell to the relentless changes of climate, which led to the Mun River alligator’s extinction (photo credit to The Nation).
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