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Vulnerable: American crocodile, mugger crocodile, and dwarf crocodile. The main threat to crocodilians worldwide is human activity, including hunting and habitat destruction. Early in the 1970s, more than 2 million wild crocodilian skins had been traded, depleting the majority of crocodilian populations, in some cases almost to extinction.
Crocodiles (family Crocodylidae) or true crocodiles are large, semiaquatic reptiles that live throughout the tropics in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australia.The term “crocodile” is sometimes used more loosely to include all extant members of the order Crocodilia, which includes the alligators and caimans (both members of the family Alligatoridae), the gharial and false gharial (both ...
Rutiodon, one of the aquatic and superficially crocodile-like phytosaurs. Thecodontia (meaning 'socket-teeth'), now considered an obsolete taxonomic grouping, was formerly used to describe a diverse "order" of early archosaurian reptiles that first appeared in the latest Permian period and flourished until the end of the Triassic period.
Extinct crocodylomorphs were considerably more ecologically diverse than modern crocodillians. The earliest and most primitive crocodylomorphs are represented by " sphenosuchians ", a paraphyletic assemblage containing small-bodied, slender forms with elongated limbs that walked upright, which represents the ancestral morphology of Crocodylomorpha.
A Brazilian scientist has identified fossils of a small crocodile-like reptile that lived during the Triassic Period several million years before the first dinosaurs. The fossils of the predator ...
Unearthed in a rock layer dating back to the Triassic period, between 252 million and 201 million years ago, the Gondwanax paraisensis fossil comes from the time when dinosaurs as well as mammals ...
Cladistically, it is defined as Crocodylus niloticus (the Nile crocodile) and all crocodylians more closely related to C. niloticus than to either Alligator mississippiensis (the American alligator) or Gavialis gangeticus (the gharial). [5] This is a stem-based definition for crocodiles, and is more inclusive than the crown group Crocodylidae. [3]
Crocodiles with teeth the size of bananas were apparently a nightmare that actually existed during the Late Cretaceous period. A pair of researchers with the University of Iowa decided to re ...