The small, recently extinct, island-dwelling crocodilians of the south Pacific
Here’s an interesting contention: until just a few thousand years ago, small crocodilians inhabited the tropical islands of the South Pacific and elsewhere. In fact, judging from recent discoveries, small terrestrial crocodilians were an ordinary component of many tropical island groups, and they presumably still would be, had they not been made extinct by people.
The first of these animals to be discovered was Mekosuchus inexpectatus from New Caledonia (life restoration shown above), a species that most interested people have heard about due to its coverage in popular books (e.g., Jean-Christophe Balouet’s Extinct Species of the World, Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters and Charles Ross’s Crocodiles and Alligators ). Discovered in 1980, this species entered the literature in 1983 when Eric Buffetaut described its remains (teeth and skull bones) from a site on the Isle of Pines, just off New Caledonia. It was a small crocodilian, around 2 m long, and crushing teeth at the back of its jaws suggest that it ate molluscs on occasion. Based on the apparently archaic nature of its postorbital bar, Buffetaut (1983) speculated that this animal might be a late-surviving relict form from the Cretaceous. By 1987, Buffetaut and colleague Jean-Christophe Balouet had enough material (now from mainland New Caledonia as well as the Isle of Pines) to name the species. They regarded it as distinctive enough for its own family, Mekosuchidae, and they proposed that Mekosuchidae might be a relict group outside of the clade formed by the living crocodilian species (Balouet & Buffetaut 1987).
https://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2009/05/13/mekosuchines-2009
With the extinction of M. Inexpectatus around 3000 years ago came the complete eradication of Mekosuchinae, a clade of crocodilians that had existed for about 50 million years.
