Cold Blooded Assassin | Evolutionary Secrets of the Crocodile

Crocodiles deliver the most powerful bite in the animal kingdom!

The next stage of the kill is to pull their prey into the water and drown it. To do that the crocodile has had to evolve teeth tough enough to take the strain. Crocs don’t have sharp enough teeth to slice through meat, so they use what’s known as the death roll to tear off chunks of food. One mystery of the death roll is how crocs manage to keep their mouth underwater without drowning.

We’ve seen that the crocs head is equipped with the hardware it needs to trap and kill its prey, but first it must catch that prey, and to do that it uses a huge piece of anatomy representing almost half of its body – its tail.

Crocodiles have evolved as masters of the water but as a biomechanics expert reveals, crocodiles can also get around on land in more ways than you might think…

It’s believed their running ability may date back to the time of the dinosaurs when small crocodile ancestors ran down their prey. 200 million years ago ancient crocodile relatives lived on land, like Terrestrisuchus, a long-legged reptile not much bigger than a rabbit. Later some crocs took to the water, their eyes and nostrils moved to the top of their heads, allowing them to keep a low profile, and supported by water their bodies dramatically increased in size. 110 million years ago enormous mega crocs like Sarcosuchus grew over 10 metres long, these super crocs died out, but their smaller cousins flourished and started to resemble more modern crocodiles. Remarkably over the last 100 million years they’ve hardly changed at all.

Clip from the award-winning “Inside Nature’s Giants” documentary series that gets under the skin of the largest animals on the planet returns to reveal the anatomy of some of nature's most successful predators

Watch the complete Crocodile episode here –    • Inside Nature’s Giants – Crocodile  

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