The crocodile is one of the deadliest predators in the world. Unfortunately, they find themselves prey to something far more dangerous.The title is certainly attention-grabbing and it turns out to be true despite the information in the video itself, which placed the divergence of crocodiles, gavials, and alligators at or just after the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, which was after the last mass extinction. Wikipedia saves the title.
The three primary branches of Crocodilia had diverged by the end of the Mesozoic. The possible earliest-known members of the group may be Portugalosuchus from the Cenomanian (95 million years ago),[20] though the classification of this taxon has been disputed.[21][22] After are alligatoroids and gavialoids that lived in North America and Europe during the Campanian (around 83.6–72.1 million years ago). The first known crocodyloids appeared in the Maastrichtian (around 72.1–66.0 million years ago), that lineage must have been present during the Campanian, and the earliest alligatoroids and gavialoids include highly derived forms, which indicates that the time of the actual divergence between the three lineages must have been a pre-Campanian event.So the crocodiles really did survive the most recent mass extinction, not just their ancestors. May they survive a possible sixth mass extinction.
This blog is likely to pass its page view goal for June before I post the next entry, so look for something evergreen tomorrow. Stay tuned.
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