- But after the recent discovery of a partial skull, the caimans of years past may provide some clarity into the complex, and incomplete, history of its relatives and their movements across time and space.
- The caiman was deemed to be 42 million years old by using a combination of investigative techniques, including radiometric dating, biochronology, and biostratigraphy, where paleontologists use the relative order of the fossilized animals to find out how old the rocks are.
- The fossil will be housed at the Texas Vertebrate Paleontology Collections at the University of Texas at Austin where it will be preserved and maintained in perpetuity.
New fossil provides clarity to the history of Alligatoridae
