In 1932, the paleontologist Friedrich von Huene described a beat-up, but associated, skull found in the 228-208 million year old strata in the vicinity of Pfaffenhofen, Germany. Huene thought the bones belonged to some sort of theropod dinosaur – similar to Coelophysis from Triassic North America – but that was virtually all that could be said on the basis of such limited material. He named the fossil as a new species of Halticosaurus, a dinosaur whose remains were found in the same strata.

Now that additional rock has been delicately cleaned from the bone, the nature of Halticosaurus is clearer. The animal was more closely related to crocodiles than dinosaurs. Researchers suspected this before the paper by Sues and Schoch, but the