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.