Ah, the Triassic. The dawn of the dinosaurs. Not like there were any other reptiles doing strange and interesting things at the time. As popular science narratives love to remind us, it was the dinosaurs who clawed their way out of the Triassic, from under the feet of the widespread protocrocs, to thrive and conquer the planet through the Jurassic and Cretaceous.

Funny how we seem so prone to putting crocodiles and their relatives on the back foot. I feel for the ancient archosaurs.

The evolutionary tangle that contains today’s alligators, crocodiles, and gharials branched off from the ancestors of the dinosaurs more than 246 million years ago. The reptiles didn’t look like the swamp puppies we know and love today. The earliest of what paleontologists often call crocodile-line archosaurs were sharp-toothed, terrestrial animals. Throughout the Triassic, they diversified not only in number of species, but size, anatomy, and behavior. By around 220 million years ago, the time that gives us the standard image of Triassic life thanks to classic localities like Petrified Forest National Park and Ghost Ranch, crocodile relatives included toothless omnivores that ran on two legs, deep-skulled carnivores comparable in size to Allosaurus, shovel-nosed herbivores that were so armored that they had spikes around their cloacae, and more.

The only reason we don’t celebrate these pseudosuchians more is because they were hit hard by a mass extinction at the end of the Triassic. Some survived and continued a stunning Jurassic and Cretaceous resurgence that replayed some of the hits from the Triassic, as well as some new tricks like becoming semi-aquatic over and over again, but these reptiles, more than Mesozoic mammals, often live in the shadow of the dinosaurs in the popular imagination.

I’m often tempted to think what the Mesozoic would have been like if the end-Triassic extinction never happened, if dinosaurs and the full sweep of crocodile disparity evolved alongside each other uninterrupted, but at least we’re finding even more reasons to admire what crocs were doing while Triassic dinosaurs were just getting their feet under themselves. Case in point, a stubby-snouted croc uncovered with a snappy relative at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico.

In 1948, the better part of a century ago, paleontologists with the American Museum of Natural History excavated a great deal of fossil blocks from the orange, Late Triassic rocks of what’s now Ghost Ranch. You may have seen fossils from this effort before, particularly the small carnivorous dinosaur Coelophysis that were entombed by the dozens in the same place. But other animals were found in the bonebed, too, including a skull that paleontologists previously thought belonged to a small, slender crocodile relative called Hesperosuchus agilis. It seemed similar enough, and for a time Hesperosuchus was the small Triassic croc found in North America’s southwest. Whenever a similar fossil form was found, it was labeled as Hesperosuchus.

Only, as paleontologist Miranda Margulis-Ohnuma and colleagues report, all of the fossils assigned to Hesperosuchus span a time period of 20 million years. That’s too long for one protocroc genus to stick around, guessing from the comings and goings of other ancient species through evolutionary time. Some must be something else. And, confirming previous suggestions that there may be undiscovered crocs in the “Hesperosuchus” collection, Margulis-Ohnuma and colleagues found that a skull that came to rest in the Yale University collections, YPM VP 41198, actually belonged to a new, stubby-snouted genus. Even better, the fossil was buried right next to the skull of a definitive Hesperosuchus, demonstrating that two different little crocs were gamboling around the same Triassic conifer forests.

The Yale fossil includes more than just the skull. The paleontologists report bones from the spine, the hips, the limbs, and body armor along with the crushed skull. But it’s the skull bones that are the most tantalizing. In comparison to Hesperosuchus, the new form had a short, “robust” skull compared to the longer, more slender look of Hesperosuchus. The differences are significant enough that Margulis-Ohnuma have named the new Triassic croc Eosphorosuchus lacrimosa - the missing Venus to the known Hesperos.

Paleontologists and anatomists well know the functional difference between a shorter, stronger skull and a longer, more delicate build. Longer, more lightly-built skulls are good for speed, a nabbing fleeing prey, while shorter snouts put more power behind a bite. Despite being similar in size and general anatomy, Eosphorosuchus had a stronger bite - implying that it was feeding in a different way, likely on different food, than Hesperosuchus. Both were found in the same bone bed, buried and perhaps even killed by the same local catastrophe in a landscape frequently singed by wildfire and slumped by heavy rain, a sure indicator that little crocs evolved into an array of forms and habits during the same time as early dinosaur like Coelophysis. And now that the find has indicated that such niche partitioning existed in the Triassic, the discovery of Eosphorosuchus hints that such undiscovered diversity might be found among little crocs in other Triassic bonebeds.

We wouldn’t have known about these little crocs without the dinosaurs. It was the abundance and beauty of Coelophysis fossils that put Ghost Ranch on the map. But as excavations and analyses have continued, it’s the crocodile relatives that come out as more diverse and abundant than the dinosaurs - animals that were so prevalent in the Triassic that there’s no way to understand the time without considering the influence of the crocs. I hope we get the big story someday. I hope someone goes back to the Triassic and focuses the camera not on the dinosaurs, with a mind towards a bird-filled montage assuring us that the terrible lizards are still here, but on the crocs, how distant and wonderful they were from the semi-aquatic ambush hunters that laze and gape among our modern swamps. The crocs deserve to step into the Triassic dawn, too.