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Re: escaping preds in H2O
chris brochu (gator@mail.utexas.edu)
27 Sep 1995 15:59:04 GMT
In article <hubey.812175744@pegasus.montclair.edu> H. M. Hubey,
hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu writes:
> since probably 99.99% of the coastline
>of AFrica or any other place is free of crocs and I don't know
>of any reason why they should have been infested a long time ago.
>
We simply do not know what the distribution of crocs along the African
coast was during the Plio-Pleistocene; indeed, we don't know how often
they occur there today, though they are known from beaches and mangrove
swamps.
We do know, however, that crocodiles occurred on Aldabra Atoll and
Madagascar. Obviously, they got there somehow, and since these are
within the crown-group Crocodylidae, they probably got there during the
Pliocene or Pleistocene. The Madagascar forms include niloticus and a
giant horned version of the dwarf crocodile (literally, a giant dwarf
crocodile ;-), and the Aldabra forms could have been either - in other
words, they were derived from African forms, not Siwaliks or Indian
subcontinent taxa.
chris
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