WASHINGTON, Jan 26: A toothless, two-legged crocodile ancestor that walked upright and had a beak instead of teeth was discovered in the basement of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, according to a report published on Wednesday.

The 210 million-year-old fossil had sat in storage at the museum for nearly 60 years and was found only by accident, the paleontologists said.

The animal is interesting because it closely resembles a completely unrelated dinosaur called an ostrich dinosaur that lived 80 million years later, they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a British science journal.

“A lot of people, from seeing (the film) Jurassic Park know what an ostrich dinosaur looked like,” said museum curator Mark Norell. “This is a case of convergence with the ostrich dinosaur. It evolved more than once.”

The six-foot-long (2-metre) fossil is an archosaur, an extinct type of animal that includes the ancestors of dinosaurs, crocodilians and birds. It lived in what is now New Mexico, in the US southwest.

It was discovered in blocks of rock from the Ghost Ranch Quarry that were excavated in 1947 and 1948.

Scientists thought that all the specimens were Coelophysis, a small, carnivorous dinosaur that lived at the same time.

“It was collected in this quarry that literally had hundreds of skeletons in it,” Norell said in a telephone interview.

Norell and graduate student Sterling Nesbitt were looking for Coelophysis fossils when they opened a plaster cast containing the archosaur, which they have named Effigia okeeffeae. The name recalls both the ranch and painter Georgia O’Keefe, who had an interest in the quarry.

Effigia is closely related to an ancient group of reptiles called crocodilians, which includes today’s crocodiles and alligators. It was not a dinosaur.—Reuters