{"id":1395,"date":"2022-02-18T01:40:05","date_gmt":"2022-02-18T01:40:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interestinganimalfacts.com\/?p=1395"},"modified":"2022-02-18T01:40:07","modified_gmt":"2022-02-18T01:40:07","slug":"interesting-animal-facts-about-crocodiles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interestinganimalfacts.com\/interesting-animal-facts-about-crocodiles\/","title":{"rendered":"Interesting Animal Facts About Crocodiles"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Crocodiles have to be one of the most famous animals in the world.
Their long, pointed snouts, their scaly, bulbous skin, and their large size make them stand out from the other top predators from the animal kingdom, such as wolves, bears, their scaly snake cousins, and the big cats.
These magnificent creatures have been a part of our cultural perception of wild animals for as long as that has been a concept for us.
As a part of that, we have also tried to learn as much as we can about these dangerous, almost ancient-looking, creatures that patrol the rivers and lakes of our world.
And what we\u2019ve learned so far is amazing. And we\u2019re going to show you some of these interesting pieces of information in this article.
Here are just some of the wildest facts that we know about crocodiles!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s get one of the most obvious facts about Crocodiles out of the way: They\u2019re big.
But there\u2019s something special about how big these animals are, especially when you compare them to their other scaly relatives.
Most of the reptiles that you can find in the wild are fairly small. Many species of lizards, turtles, and snakes will range from anywhere from a few centimeters to about a meter in length.
Of course, there are exceptions to these. Some species of the Anaconda can grow up to 5 meters long, there are plenty of monitor lizards that can get pretty large, including the Komodo Dragon, the world\u2019s largest living lizard, at 3 meters in the biggest examples.
And the Gal\u00e1pagos tortoises and Leatherback Sea Turtles are huge in their own right too. But these are usually exceptionally big for their family of animals, and not common around the world.
The crocodile family, meanwhile, are almost all very large reptiles and are some of the biggest meat eaters in their habitat.
The smallest crocodilian, Cuvier\u2019s Dwarf Caiman from South America, for example, can get as large as 1.6 meters. If you want to be picky, and only include species that are \u2018true\u2019 crocodiles, the West African Dwarf Crocodile, can get as large as a grown man, up to 1.8 Meters.
And this isn\u2019t even talking about the biggest crocodile of them all. The king of today\u2019s reptiles: The Saltwater Crocodile.
These are not only the biggest crocodiles in the world right now. They are some of the biggest predators that you\u2019ll find on land, period. The largest saltwater crocodile ever caught on record weighed well over a tone, and was a massive 6 meters, about 21 feet long!
To put that into perspective, that\u2019s as long as 2 family cars, pressed bumper-to-bumper, combined!
The most incredible, and probably terrifying, thing about crocodiles, is that they used to be even bigger than that.
One of their ancestors from the Late Cretaceous period, about 70 million years ago, known as Deinosuchus, was an absolute titan in its day, measuring over 10 meters, or 33 feet, long!
Although it would have been an amazing creature to see in real life, perhaps it is best that they don\u2019t get that big anymore, and are happy with just being only 2 big cars long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whilst we\u2019re on the subject of their giant ancestors, let’s take a moment to discuss just how old this family of animals is.
We already talked about how some of the largest crocodiles to have ever lived during the late Cretaceous period, which was roughly 90 to 66 million years ago. This meant that they were rubbing shoulders, or claws rather, with some of the last living dinosaurs of the time.
Interestingly enough, when you think about how big it was, and how it probably behaved like many of its modern-day relatives, it doesn\u2019t take a paleontologist to figure out that Deionsuchus, and other crocodiles of the day, probably chowed down on some of the biggest dinosaurs in North America!
A predator of predators indeed. Step aside T-Rex, there\u2019s a new king lizard in town!
The cretaceous is actually a time when we start to see many of the modern families of lizards starting to evolve.
Snakes had just started to evolve from lizards, as well as most when we start seeing a lot of the ancestors of mammals today showing up, such as primates, animals with hooves, alongside rodents that were already scampering around the forest floors of the world.
The family that many modern crocodiles come from starts here, the imaginatively named \u2018Crocodilia\u2019 family, which means that Deinosuchus was one of the first \u2018true\u2019 crocodiles to evolve.
Talk about knocking it out of the park when it comes to size, and early on even!<\/p>\n\n\n\n