He cries crocodile tears …
- University of California, Davis, 4860 Y St, Suite 2400, Sacramento, CA 95817, USA (Irschwab@ucdavis.edu; BrooksD@mail.vetmed.ufl.edu)
The saurian triumph which occurred during the Mesozoic era probably ended with a cosmic bomb slamming into the Yucatan 65 million years ago annihilating the dinosaurs. Somewhere in the dark ooze that remained after that catastrophic explosion, some opportunistic creatures were able to survive by capturing live prey, be they fish or terrestrial animals, feeding exclusively on carrion, or even going for long periods without eating anything whatsoever. These grisly veterans are old—very old, as they can trace their lineage to at least the Middle Triassic epoch about 240 million years ago, and they were not about to let a comet interfere with their longevity. From those tough and resistant predecessors come our modern day crocodilians, with surprisingly few, and mostly conservative, morphological changes in their skeletal structure.
The American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) is one of the 23 species of crocodilians. Living in the southeastern United States in swamps and bayous with a maximum length of 5-6 metres and weighing as much as two Sumo wrestlers (between 800–1000 lb (364–455 kg)), this species is important to the biodiversity and ecology of the area, but may also offer us an unintended glimpse into our evolutionary past by looking through their eyes.
The crocodilians, represented here by the American alligator (including an albino shown in the upper left portion of the cover), have several …
