February 22, 2013
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sherlock holmes and the great crocadile caper
i tell you, the mystery just gets bigger and more elusive when one tries to comprehend what happened to the earth in the primordial times. never mind that now they (nasa) are thinking that the moon pretty much is the result of another no longer existing object smacking into the earth and after mucking up the earth so much that the moon was formed alongside the earth. the gist is, the moon is made of the earth. which to the normal public would be hunky dory but to myself, i am left wondering how the rare earth metals which are deep in the earth’s crust and so elusive that china, due to its having a large amount easily accessible and thereby monopolizing the best they can the trade of rare earth metals, fears the fact that the moon has the same metals on the surface. yep, they literally are worried about the exploration of the moon for this reason. anyways, how something so deep in the earth, gets whacked, then as a dust ball encircling the earth then magically makes the rare earth metals stay on the surface and then somehow obtains an orbit perfect to not even rotate,etc etc.. nasa has some good dreamers.
but this is not what has me writing today.nope today i wanna talk about crocodiles. because they are a big mystery. being roughly 280 million years in the making and the present existing genera is only about roughly 55 million years. the ones that exist today came around the Eocene era. which is roughly when horse had three toes and were roughly the size of a normal dog. the mystery, is how did they survive when pretty much every dinosaur (except them, birds ,turtles and basic lizards) vanished?
someone once suggested it was because of the area they were in. well, that would mean that the dinosaurs that existed in that same area would have survived too. as we know, there is better chance or equal chance of finding an as yet hairy hominid in north america then there is finding a dinosaur. the greater portion of this mystery gets even more profound when one considers that even the reptiles in the ocean died out. but, not the crocadilians, who had a completely aquatic type living in the ocean,quite effectively. it looked like an eel only had a crocodile type of head and four lobes for legs.
it has been suggested that the air was probably bad or a type of virus/bacterial sickness wiped out the dinosaurs.however since we have birds and they are pretty susceptible to viral disease as we in modern times have to watch out for the flu strains that they carry,this doesn’t seem likely. such pathology as is present ,doesn’t seem to really care about the phylum of host. it can be mammal/reptiles in most cases. besides, there would still be existing types from areas not affected. dinosaurs were everywhere.
however, there is somethings to consider when comparing crocodiles to reptiles as we understand them. the croc’s determine gender in the eggs by temperature.that is how they choose sex. this is unimaginable in the time that the species has existed. i cant describe easily how messed up the climate was on earth. there was volcanic activity that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs in a large part. for roughly thousand years, massive super volcanoes were erupting and creating an erratic climate that was pretty much forcing many species of life into the edge of existence. the asteroid was the tip of the iceberg. this is how the fact that dinosaurs may have been able to regulate their body temperature,like a bird . warmblooded as it may be called. not like us, but effective. an example is how sharks can regulate their temperature,keeping warm,by using their muscles.
so, basically, in an erratic and unstable climate,how does an animal that places its eggs into a clumped up pile of vegetation and dirt or into a pit which is then compacted by the sand hope to survive , if the gender is temperature conditioned?
somehow i find the odds of them surviving any length of time through this ordeal quite incredulous.but as you all know they did. what makes it even more strange is the fact that they can group up, not attack each other, communicate in roughly 35 different sounds, some of the noises they make are so low in frequency that the human ear cant even detect it. they have sensitive skin, even know its thick and use a pheromone scent to communicate intimacy and readiness for mating.
on average , on land a crocodile can top roughly 11 or 7 mph. so whatever it was that they did, land was not the choice for the survival. in the ocean however, they can go up to 400 km and have trans-located to pretty much everywhere the climate can support them. they have the ability to swallow and hunt under water, with a fleshy cap at the throat ,to block the water when hunting submerged. they can go up to a year with no feeding if they have a big feast.they will coordinate and even appear to be able to work as a team. when a kill, or a carrion is found at the water’s edge,they will group up,sometimes more then a hundred, then, while two or so hold the dead animal ,say a big cow, in place the crocodiles will line up and take turns biting and feeding, in an orderly fashion.
if there is a threat to the young,say from other crocodiles. a mother crocodile will escort them to a pond that other ones have gone to, deposit her young into the pond and the mothers will leave their young (sometimes in the order of a few hundred of them) to be watched by a single female.who takes the job on as if they were all her own.
there is no real way to understand how they have survived. when all the other dinosaurs didn’t. nothing really seems to stick out as a reason. the only ideas i have so far is two fold and even then i am not sure how they work into the mystery. the first one is, i think the crocodiles that exist today (this includes the alligators and all other types) are an animal in transition. i think they were probably working for the ocean,but something happened.they ended up staying on land or shore dwelling, like for instance the sand pipers and crabs. plus a vague clue comes from the fact they have no wariness of humans.they see us as food.period. they do not know us, or recognize us the way a good portion of the land animals do. they don’t have the built caution that say, wolves or lions or horses or pretty much everything else does when they encounter us. this means,they evolved and somehow managed to stay away from even our early ancestors. somehow,they do not recognize us the same way. however they do practice a degree of wariness around lions. so i have no clue. it is a mystery. a good one at that. there are many more things about crocodiles that defy the common concept of lizard/reptiles. i think, that part of the problem is, we don’t think of them the right way.we have to remember that they are dinosaurs, literally. not thinking or behaving like the lizards or the birds. anyways, hope i managed to intrigue some of you.