So a couple of days ago a new phytosaur was published by Datta and Ray from India's Tiki Formation. For those unaware, Phytosaurs are large, superficially croc-like reptiles that lived in freshwater throughout much of the Triassic. They can easily be separated from crocs by the fact that their nose is on top of the head. But I digress. So Datta and Ray described Colossosuchus based on over 300 remains from a bonebed, containing everything from young animals less than 5 meters long to absolute giants.
The paper included the composite skeletal you see above, which I scaled here compared to Steve Irwin, which already yields an impressive animal. HOWEVER this skeleton wasn't scaled to the biggest known material, a lower jaw 1.1 meters long. So I did that and....
that gives us THIS ABSOLUTE MONSTER. Over 8 meters long (the tail tip is missing in the image above) and easily one of the biggest phytosaurs we know off. Of course thats assuming that these are the correct propotions seeing as its a combination of multiple individuals of a single bonebed. I can't say much since phytosaurs aren't my speciality, but as far as the claims of the papers go thats what they suggest.
Whats also fun is that this is not the only phytosaur from the Tiki Formation. In 2019 the same authors described Volcanosuchus, a smaller phytosaur but no less interesting. Here you see a reconstruction of Volcanosuchus compared to a reconstruction of Colossosuchus.
Then obviously the next question I had was "How big would they be next to each other?" So I scaled the skull of Volcanosuchus (scalebar is 5 cm) to the largest individual Colossosuchus (with the reconstructed skull superimposed) and well its not even close.
I really gotta look more into phytosaurs at some point, since I know a lot less about them than I'd like to. So that could be an interesting research journey in the future. Also might make a proper size chart based on these for Wikipedia eventually if I find the motivation.