Paleontologists working a quarry near Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, have formally described a reptile that belonged to the crocodile family tree yet looked and moved nothing like any crocodilian alive today. The animal walked upright on two long hind legs, had shrunken forelimbs, and possessed a completely toothless skull. Its name, Labrujasuchus expectatus, roughly translates to “the expected witch crocodile,” a nod to the nearby town of Abiquiu and to the fact that researchers had been anticipating a find like this from the site for years.
The formal description, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology in mid-2026, places the species at roughly 212 million years old, deep in the Late Triassic’s Norian stage. That was a period when dinosaurs were still relatively small upstarts and crocodile-line archosaurs held a far wider range of ecological roles than their modern descendants suggest. According to press materials released by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the skeleton preserves enough of the pelvis, hind limbs, and forelimbs to confirm that Labrujasuchus was an obligate biped, meaning it did not simply rear up occasionally but spent its life on two legs.
A crocodile cousin built like a dinosaur
Labrujasuchus belongs to Shuvosauridae, a small family of archosaurs on the crocodile side of the evolutionary split that independently evolved body plans eerily similar to ornithomimid, or “ostrich mimic,” dinosaurs. Other members of the family, such as Effigia okeeffeae (also from Ghost Ranch) and Shuvosaurus inexpectatus from Texas, had already shown paleontologists that the crocodile lineage once produced lean, long-legged runners. But Labrujasuchus adds a new species to the group and strengthens the case that these animals were not evolutionary flukes but a genuine radiation of bipedal croc relatives spread across Late Triassic North America.
The fossil comes from the Hayden Quarry, a prolific dig site within the Chinle Formation’s Petrified Forest Member in northern New Mexico. During the Late Triassic, this part of New Mexico was a lush river-and-floodplain system near the equator, teeming with early dinosaurs, large amphibians, armored aetosaurs, and predatory rauisuchians. Shuvosaurids shared that landscape, and their toothless, beaked skulls hint at a feeding strategy very different from the ambush-hunting crocodilians we know today.
Toothless and mysterious
One of the most striking features of Labrujasuchus is its complete lack of teeth. All known shuvosaurids share this trait, and it raises a question paleontologists have not yet settled: what did these animals eat? A toothless beak in a modern bird can serve wildly different purposes. Ostriches use theirs to crop vegetation. Storks use theirs to snatch fish and frogs. Without preserved gut contents or microscopic wear analysis of the jaw margins of Labrujasuchus, researchers cannot pin down whether it was an herbivore, an omnivore, or something else entirely.
The precise anatomical features that distinguish Labrujasuchus from its close relatives Effigia and Shuvosaurus are detailed in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology paper. That paper remains behind a journal paywall, which limits how far public discussion of the animal’s unique traits can go. What the available press materials do make clear is that the research team considers the overall body plan remarkable, citing the combination of obligate bipedalism, toothlessness, and crocodile-line ancestry packed into a single animal as unlike anything else in the known fossil record of the crocodile lineage.
Footprints from the other side of the world
The New Mexico skeleton is not the only evidence that crocodile relatives once walked on two legs. In 2020, a team working in the Jinju Formation of South Korea published trackway evidence in Scientific Reports documenting large bipedal footprints made by a crocodylomorph. The prints showed narrow-gauge stride patterns and foot proportions consistent with an animal moving at speed on its hind legs alone, with no trace of forefeet touching the ground.
Those Korean tracks date to the Cretaceous, roughly 100 million years younger than Labrujasuchus and from the opposite side of the globe. The two lines of evidence are suggestive together but indirect. The Korean trackmaker’s skeleton is unknown, and Labrujasuchus has no associated footprints. Whether both groups arrived at bipedalism through the same biomechanical pathway or through entirely separate evolutionary routes is a question neither dataset can answer on its own. Still, the pairing underscores a broader point: bipedal locomotion in the crocodile lineage was not a one-off oddity confined to a single continent or era. It happened repeatedly.
What the bones show and what they do not
Readers following this discovery should keep two categories of evidence separate. The first is osteological: actual bones from a single quarry, formally named and described in a peer-reviewed journal. Bones allow direct measurement of limb proportions, joint geometry, and muscle attachment sites, making them the gold standard in paleontology. The second is ichnological: fossilized footprints that record behavior rather than anatomy. Tracks capture what an animal actually did, not just what its skeleton could theoretically allow, but they cannot confirm species identity.
Phrases like “ran like an ostrich” are useful shorthand, but they originate in popular summaries rather than in the technical literature. The original Korean trackway paper used measured language about stride patterns and bipedal consistency, not vivid bird analogies. When those metaphors migrate into headlines, they can imply certainty about speed or posture that the underlying data do not yet support. The headline phrase “strangest reptile build ever found” similarly reflects informal characterizations in press coverage rather than a direct quote from the scientific paper. Full limb-bone measurements and stride-length calculations from the Labrujasuchus holotype have not appeared in publicly accessible supplementary data, so independent biomechanical modeling of the animal’s top speed or gait cycle is not yet possible.
Why a two-legged croc relative reshapes Triassic ecology
The Triassic was the last period in Earth’s history when the crocodile lineage rivaled dinosaurs in ecological diversity. Croc relatives filled roles as apex predators, armored herbivores, and, as shuvosaurids show, fleet-footed bipeds. Understanding how and why that diversity collapsed, leaving only the semi-aquatic ambush hunters we recognize today, is one of the central questions in Mesozoic paleontology. Every new shuvosaurid species sharpens the picture of what was lost.
Labrujasuchus expectatus is one data point, but it is a well-dated, well-documented one from a formation that has already reshaped understanding of Late Triassic ecosystems. As additional specimens are prepared and the full anatomical dataset becomes available to the broader research community, the portrait of these “almost-dinosaurs” on the crocodile branch will only get sharper. For now, the bones from Ghost Ranch are clear on at least one point: the crocodile family tree once produced something far stranger than anything lurking in a modern swamp.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
