Toward the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, during a time known as the Late Cretaceous, a new type of giant predator appeared along the southern coasts of North America. It was a huge species of crocodylian and is called Deinosuchus. Neither a crocodile nor an alligator, it was an ancestor of both modern groups, but it reached weights of many tons and it had some features unique to the species. Average-sized individuals were bigger than the carnivorous dinosaurs with which they cohabited; the largest specimens were the size of a T-rex.;This is the biography of these giant beasts, including the long history of their discovery, research about their makeup, and the first published evidence about their prey. Generations of people have stared at the 6-foot reconstructed skull at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, not realising that the only real bones in the specimen were bits of snout and lower jaw. New fossils and research show that the actual animal was quite different from the reconstruction, and now we can reliably assemble the skull and the remainder of the animal.;The book also deals with the ancient life and geology of the coastal areas where Deinosuchus thrived, in