The 60-million-year-old Acherontisuchus guajiraensis lived alongside the snake and a bevy of other reptiles in an Amazon-like river system, which wove through one of Earth's earliest rain forests before eventually emptying into what's now the Caribbean Sea.

In fact, one of the problems a growing croc "would have had to deal with is trying to get fish without irritating Titanoboa to the point where, rather than going for the fish, it'd go for a croc," quipped study leader Alex Hastings, a University of Florida graduate student in vertebrate paleontology who works with the school's Florida Museum of Natural History. (Read about another prehistoric crocodile that may have been eaten by Titanoboa.)

Fossils of the prehistoric croc were first