A 95-million-year-old, never-before-seen 'tiny skull' of a crocodile-like creature has been discovered in Montana.

An artist's rendering of Elton (Thikarisuchus xenodentes), an extinct crocodile-like creature from the Cretaceous Period of North America. (Image credit: Illustration by Dane Johnson/Museum of the Rockies)

A new study suggests that about 95 million years ago, small crocodile-like creatures with strange teeth hidden in a sheath dug burrows along the shores of the Western Interior Seaway in what is now southwest Montana.

A new study describes the first such creature ever discovered—a juvenile crocodile named Elton, who measured approximately 60 centimeters from nose to tail. Elton's fossilized remains were discovered in 2021 during organized excavations in the Blackleaf Formation, which dates back to the mid-Cretaceous period (145–66 million years ago).

“We've found dinosaurs before (at Blackcliff), but this was the second known vertebrate found in this formation,” said lead study author Harrison Allen, a paleontology doctoral student at Stony Brook University in New York who discovered the fossil as an undergraduate at Montana State University. “It introduced me to the fascinating world of prehistoric extinct crocodiles and their evolutionary niches.”

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According to the statement, the first fossil Allen noticed was Elton's skull, just 5 centimeters long, buried in a rock. Allen showed the miniature skull to David Varricchio, a professor of paleobiology, taphonomy, and ichnology at Montana State University, who immediately recognized the fossil's significance.

“After the excavation, Dr. Varricchio told me why he was so excited the day I found the first specimen,” Allen said. “It had so many visible anatomical structures to study, and he saw that it was a tiny crocodile skull, completely preserved and articulated—it was something special.”

It turned out that Elton belonged to a now-extinct family of crocodile-like creatures, or crocodyliforms, whose existence was previously unknown to researchers. This family, called Wannchampsidae, is part of the Neosuchia group, which includes all modern crocodiles and their closest extinct relatives. Its representatives inhabited North America during the Cretaceous Period and were significantly smaller than other neosuchians; had Elton survived to adulthood, he would have grown to only 90 cm in length, the statement said.

Neosuchians are typically semiaquatic or marine predators with simple conical teeth, but not Elton. He and other members of the new species, named Thikarisuchus xenodentes, had a variety of teeth, including hidden and other specialized fangs, which they used to eat plants and insects, the statement said.

Elton and his ilk also lived on land, and they likely dug burrows in the ground, judging by how tightly packed Elton's bones were when Allen and his colleagues analyzed them, the statement said.

Soon after discovering Elton's skull, Allen returned to collect bags full of the surrounding sediment to gather more information about the animal. He spent hours sifting through the soil, extracting bone fragments and piece by piece reconstructing the Thikarisuchus skeleton. He worked with his classmate Dane Johnson, now a paleontology lab and field specialist at the Museum of the Rockies in Montana, often to the tune of Elton John's 1972 song “Crocodile Rock,” which inspired the name Elton.