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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.
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 ...
While dinosaurs were the dominant animals on land, the crocodiles flourished in rivers, swamps, and the oceans, with far greater diversity than they have today. With the end-Cretaceous extinction , the dinosaurs became extinct, with the exception of the birds, while the crocodilians continued with little change.
The American Museum of Natural History incorporated the skull and jaw fragments into a plaster restoration, modeled after the present-day Cuban crocodile. Colbert and Bird stated this was a "conservative" reconstruction, since an even greater length could have been obtained if a long-skulled modern species, such as the saltwater crocodile had ...
Dinosaurs initially were overshadowed by other animals, including large crocodile relatives - both terrestrial and semi-aquatic - and various plant-eaters including elephant-sized ones related to ...
But dinosaur brain cases more closely resemble those of modern-day reptiles like crocodiles, Caspar said. For animals like crocodiles, brain matter occupies only 30% to 50% of the brain cavity.
One of the traits that helped make the dinosaurs such an evolutionary success story - thriving for 165 million years - was their fast growth rate, from massive meat-eaters like Tyrannosaurus to ...