This Ancient Sea Cow Was Killed by a Croc and Eaten by a Shark

This Ancient Sea Cow Was Killed by a Croc and Eaten by a Shark

By Meghan Bartels

The circle of life is beautiful and gruesome—sometimes so gruesome that it makes the fossil record downright macabre, millions of years after the fact.

That’s what happened with an ancient manateelike animal whose remains were uncovered in western Venezuela in 2019. The specimen didn’t draw much interest at first; it isn’t particularly well preserved. But as scientists looked closer, they realized the creature’s skull parts and vertebrae were riddled with bite marks—from two very different mouths.

“As soon as you start to take a look at the details, you realize that there is something really special about the animal,” says Aldo Benites-Palomino, a final-year Ph.D. student in paleontology at the University of Zurich. He’s a co-author of a paper published on August 29 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology that reports the find and uses the fossilized evidence of violence to start piecing together how species interacted in this little-studied region of South America.

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“Bite marks are really interesting to study because you don’t feel like a paleontologist—you feel mostly like a forensic specialist,” Benites-Palomino says. The case at hand:

Victim: one sea cow, genus Culebratherium—perhaps 16 feet long, although the fossil isn’t well enough preserved for the researchers to be sure.

Time of death: early to mid-Miocene, 23 million to 11.6 million years ago.

Scene of the crime: an ancient coastline of brackish water and mangrovelike forests.

Benites-Palomino and his colleagues began their investigation by identifying three different…