Here’s another beast you can be happy has skulked its last: the Aegisuchus witmeri—or Shieldcroc—an ancestor of the modern crocodile that lived in Africa perhaps 95 million years ago. Described this year by investigators at the University of Missouri, who studied a skull fossil discovered years ago in Morocco, the animal is thought to have been about 30 ft. (9 m) from tail-tip to nose, with a head alone that was five ft. (1.5 m) long. It got its name from the heavy shield of thick skin it likely carried on its head—though that feature itself was not preserved on the skull. Instead, Missouri anatomists inferred its existence by analyzing scarring on the bone from veins that kept the shield fed with blood—a nifty a bit of paleontological forensics.