The Late Triassic was full of animals that look almost familiar, right up until you place them on the evolutionary tree. One of the newest examples is Labrujasuchus expectatus, a lightly built, two-legged reptile with tiny forelimbs and a toothless beak, an animal that would not have looked out of place beside the ostrich-like dinosaurs of a much later age. Instead, Labrujasuchus belonged to the crocodile line of archosaurs, the branch that eventually gave rise to crocodilians. That makes it one of the stranger cases yet of Triassic convergence, when unrelated reptiles repeatedly stumbled into body plans that later became more familiar in dinosaurs, birds, and modern animals. Described in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the animal comes from Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico, a fossil-rich landscape already famous for preserving some of the era’s most unusual creatures. The new species adds another member to Shuvosauridae, a small group of bipedal, toothless pseudosuchians whose overall form strongly recalls ornithomimosaurs, the fast-running theropods of the Cretaceous. Video and 3D model. (CREDIT: Jorge Gonzalez) “We see …