Abstract

In 1955 French geologists discovered a fossiliferous horizon of mid Cretaceous (Aptian–Albian) age in the southern Sahara in the Republic of Niger. The richest section, a narrow 45 km long band of fluvial sandstone called Gadoufaoua, has yielded the most complete dinosaurian remains of Cretaceous age from Africa, including the iguanodontian ornithopods Lurdusaurus and Ouranosaurus (Taquet, 1976; Taquet and Russell, 1999), the diplodocoid sauropod Nigersaurus (Taquet, 1976; Sereno et al., 1999), and the spinosaurid theropod Suchomimus (Sereno et al., 1998). Crocodyliforms were among the first fossils recovered from Gadoufaoua (Faure, 1966), especially remains of the abundant long-snouted giant Sarcosuchus imperator (Broin and Taquet, 1966; Sereno et al., 2001). Contemporaneous smaller-bodied crocodyliforms include Araripesuchus wegeneri (Buffetaut, 1981) and the peirosaurid Stolokrosuchus lapparenti (Larsson and Gado, 2000). Here we describe an unusual new small-bodied notosuchian crocodyliform from Gadoufaoua that
adds an important new link to Cretaceous crocodyliforms from
South America