Fossils have been found in the Galula Formation of Rukwa Rift Basin of southwestern Tanzania, and were described in 2010 in the journal Nature.

[1] Pakasuchus is originally considered to lived approximately 105 million years ago, in the mid-Cretaceous,[2] but later age of site is reconsidered to the late Cretaceous, Cenomanian to Campanian instead.

Unlike living crocodilians, Pakasuchus had distinctive heterodont teeth that varied in shape throughout its jaws.

The molar-like teeth show a level of complexity that matches that of mammals, being able to occlude, or fit with one another, and provide sharp shearing edges for slicing food.

[5] The specific name honors Saidi Kapilima, one of the leaders of the Rukwa Rift Basin Project and who helped in the excavation of the specimens.

The molariform teeth are well suited to shearing food like modern mammalian carnivores (for example, all many species of bears, canids, big cats, hyenas, mustelids, procyonids, mongooses and pinnipeds).

Pakasuchus, as well as many other notosuchians, would have filled ecological niches in these areas that were otherwise occupied by mammals in the northern continents.

During the Early Cretaceous, the basin was part of a large river system with braided channels and low-lying vegetated floodplains.