If you know me, you probably know I like my cryptids, but out of all the REAL (for sure real, not just maybe real) animals out there, crocodilians are probably my favorite. I mean, how friggin cool are they? They are like real life dinosaurs, and these days we are learning so much more about them and their relationship with birds and Dinosaurs, etc. The possibilities are endless. It is one of the reasons I love my home so much. Florida is like a sub tropical paradise for a kid who grew up loving dinosaurs and ‘monsters’. I can practically go see giant pre historic beasts in the wild, when ever I feel like it. It will take me 20 minutes to get where I can find them, and once I am in a good place, another 30 minutes tops. My local park has one that lives there, I call him stumpy because he has 3 legs. He is in a sweet spot and clearly gets left alone for the most part eating the abundant fish, and probably the odd turtle from time to time.
A picture of Stumpy in his Natural Habitat
Florida is a really unique place in the world because this is the only place anywhere that has Crocodiles and Alligators living side by side. Yes, there is a difference. American Alligators are much more widespread, prefer freshwater and are more cold tolerant. Florida is famous for its Alligators, but the species lives as far north as North Carolina, and as far west as parts of Texas, there is even a teeny tiny sliver of Arkansas that has Alligators. They are an amazing and remarkably resilient and successful species. The grow to lengths sometimes exceeding 14-15ft, but rarely larger, and the males can be fairly bulky, but for their size and strength, they are often take less dramatic prey. The prefer fish, small mammals, turtles, birds, sometimes things like deer. They are dangerous to humans, but it takes the larger alligators to be truly dangerous to humans, and even then, my understanding is that humans are rarely considered a food item.
An American Alligator
An American Crocodile
Florida is also home to the American Crocodile. The American Crocodile is widespread is central America and the Caribbean, with large populations in places like costa Rica. It is a salt water tolerant species that prefers brackish environments and occupies Florida as only the northernmost portion of its range, and even then, it only lives reliably in the southern third of the state in coastal/brackish areas. American Crocodiles were until recently extraordinarily endangered, in the late 70s/80s there were as few as a few as 300 in the entire state. With protected status and efforts at conservation, the number of adult crocodiles is nearly 2,000 individuals, not counting hatchlings. This is a pretty remarkable comeback. What is even more interesting is the fact that people are starting to sight some really large specimens in South Florida, like the So called ‘Croczilla’ American Crocodile sighted in the everglades by photographer Kym Clark. It may be the largest confirmed crocodile in the everglades at 14.5 feet long, and its is really a monstrous looking specimen. The neatest thing to me is that this animal is probably 40-45 years old, born early in the days of crocodile conservation in earnest. Only now after 40-50 years of conservation are we starting to see a return to historic sizes for these animals, so Croczilla is a 14.5. foot beast, but it probably wont be the last, according to the NPS, American Crocodiles can reach lengths up to 20 feet. Will Florida see a 20 footer someday? Only time will tell, we will have to keep tabs on Croczilla for the next 20-25 years and see what happens….
In addition to our Native Crocodilians we also host several invasive crocodilians. This includes several species of Caiman (Natives of South American, somewhat similar to Alligators) and even other Crocodiles. Morlet’s Crocodiles, an endangered species from Mexico, have been sighted in some parts of Florida, but as of yet I am not aware of a breeding population. Perhaps the most interesting invasive crocodilian that has been sighted, and may, or may not be established, is the Nile Crocodile. This is especially interesting, and concerning, because Nile Crocodiles are one of the species that is dangerous to humans, responsible for at least a few hundred deaths every year, human beings are definitely on the menu. Nile crocs also go after different types of prey than our native alligators and crocodiles, which eat primarily fish, small mammals, turtles, birds, etc. Nile Crocodiles in their native range regularly take zebra, wildabeast, water buffalo, etc. In Florida, beef cattle would be a tasty treat for invasive Nile crocodiles. Thankfully, only a few small Nile Crocodiles have been captured in Florida, and they were all very genetically similar, indicating that they all came from the same source. With any luck, that was that and there are no more of these animals kicking around in the wild of Florida, because, that would be bad.
Isn’t this a cryptid history blog you say? What is with all the crocodile talk, NERD. I am getting there, something I was thinking about the other day, we do not see a lot of Crocodilian type cryptids these days. There a lot of sightings of cryptids that people think are something else, but they are probably just crocodilians. The biggest cryptid rumors about crocodilians out there are two fold, alligators in sewers and other places they are not supposed to be (not so much a cryptid as extant animals in unsuspecting places) and larger than average Crocodilians.
Loren Coleman, famed Cryptozoologist and prolific author, wrote on the very subject of out of place Alligators in his essay “Alligators in the Sewers: A journalistic Origin” Where he tracks down some early news articles about “Alligators in Sewers” in places like New York. He notes that these stories are particularly widespread, but that they are probably all descended from an original story in the 1930s. It is easy to see how stories like these can sort of take off and have a mind of their own. Many of them are likely inspired by incidents of people releasing pet alligators. Baby alligators are after all very small and it can be easy to trick someone into thinking ‘this wont be so bad, its so small’ but before long that adorable 12 inch long baby alligator starts growing and before long has the potential to be a 10 foot+ long behemoth. Not exactly an easy animal to keep.
In addition there is the story of Chance the Snapper, An American alligator that found its way into Humboldt Lagoon in Chicago. He had been released and was sighted in the lagoon, setting off a frenzy in the city of searching, and “Chance the Snapper’ quickly became a local celebrity. He was eventually captured by ‘gator catcher’ Frank Robb. These days Chance lives at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm and he is thriving, since his capture he was nearly doubled in size to 8 feet in length and continues to grow and thrive in his new home.
These are not necessarily cryptid stories so much as they are animal out of place stories, and Alligators, as hearty as they are, can probably not survive a winter in a place like Chicago, or even the sewers of New York (despite the idea that they are warm and humid year round) Meaning that any animals sighted in those settings will likely be a fleeting and small population, lasting only the summer.
What about larger than average Alligators and Crocodiles? Size is a hard thing to determine, many of the largest rumors come from the past where things are much harder to verify, but it is likely that a lot of these animals grew to larger size in the past before they had been overheated or lost habitat to human encroachment. If you throw a stone into alligator lore, you will find dozens of stories of Gators nearly 20 feet in length, but these are hard to verify. In modern times, I have trouble finding a verified incidence of an alligator longer 13-14 feet and weighing more than 1000 lbs. Most of them are much smaller, averaging 10-12 feet for males, smaller for females. This isn’t to suggest that a 10-12 foot Alligator is not huge, they are, and they are very dangerous at that size.
What about Crocodiles? Well, that is a whole different thing, crocodiles can reach much larger sizes and have been reported larger still. We already discussed Florida’s own ‘Croczilla’ living in the everglades and measuring at least 14-14.5 feet. For my money, that big boy is probably the biggest crocodilian ( counting both gators and crocs) in all of Florida, unless there is some truly enormous bull gator hanging out somewhere in the state. That is just in Florida though. The American Crocodile’s cousin, the Nile Crocodile of Africa grows larger, and is more aggressive. Nile crocs regularly reach lengths of 14 feet, with reported sizes of 20 feet and even larger unconfirmed animals. There are also literally hundreds of stories involving incidents where Nile Crocodiles have predated human beings.
The Saltwater Crocodile, sometimes called the Indo Pacific Crocodile, is on average larger than the Nile Crocodile. They are large predators, and are considered dangerous to humans. There are stories of crocodiles eating soldiers during World War Two in the Pacific. In Ramaree, off Burma, British soldiers drove about 500 Japanese Soldiers into the mangroves occupied by a number of Saltwater Crocodiles. Reportedly only about 20 Japanese soldiers made it back out of the swamp, with people reporting the night full of the sounds of screams, gunfire and crocodiles bellowing emanating from the Mangroves on Rameree Island. This reminds me a lot of the story of the USS Indianapolis. The ship was sunk by a Japanese Submarine and of the 800 sailors who went into the water, only 316 were pulled from the water by rescue teams a few days later. The rest were killed by the elements and shark attack. Having seen large groups of alligators in the wild and having seen two truly large Crocodiles in my life, it is really easy to see how these creatures could could do something like the massacre at Ramaree Swamp.
So what about Cryptids? Well, adjacent to Nile crocodiles are reports of enormous crocodiles in the Congo. Reports of the ‘Mahamba’ in the Congo are interesting here, the ‘Mahamba’ is a supposed 40-50 foot plus crocodile type creature living in the Congo. Many of these reports are from the 19th and early 20th century, a time where Europeans were still scratching the surface in the Congo, but Europeans themselves were still usually passing through rather than thoroughly exploring. Bob Gymlyn has a YouTube video about this subject that is worth checking out, chiefly because this because as cryptids go this is not a very famous one. There are some contenders for what the Mahamba could be, as usual I like to break this down into what is most likely, to least likely. What is most likely is that these Mahamba stories are about animals that are extant, but misidentified or exaggerated in size. West African Crocodiles (A somewhat large species, and formerly considered a subspecies of Nile Crocodile), Dwarf Crocodiles and slender snouted crocodiles can all be found in the Congo. West African Crocodiles can grow to lengths of 13 feet, but their Nile Cousin grow larger than that. In an incidence like this, a larger than average West African Crocodile, or one that was exaggerated in size, would likely account for these reports. Another more grounded explanation is large Nile Crocodiles intermingling into the Congo, and again, in an incident filled with surprise, adrenaline and fear, people exaggerated the size.
What about less likely? There are a couple options there too. Unlikely option 1? Its an undiscovered, very rare species of really enormous crocodile that prefers the Congo. 40 foot crocodilians are not ridiculous and unheard of in the fossil record, it isn’t the most absurd idea in the history of ideas that there could be an undiscovered, very rare species still out there. A really unlikely idea is the ‘Living Fossil’ idea, Sarchosuchus is a giant species of Crocodile that may have reached the lengths we are talking about here, but it lived in the time of the dinosaurs, 110 MILLION years ago. The idea that a creature like that could have continued to exist until the modern day, leaving no traces more recently in the fossil record, and not being recorded by the thousands and thousands of people, both Africans and Europeans, that have criss crossed the Congo River Basin is pretty remote, act least to me. So What is the Mahamba? For my money, it is a West African Crocodile that may be a bit larger than normal, but still no where near “40 feet” with its size exaggerated by people with poor size estimates while adrenaline was running.
Sarchosuchus Artist Illustration- source unknown
Are there Cryptid Crocodilians that I am missing? Probably. Some of the ones I have seen or heard of that I ignored are your typical high strangeness creatures that are hybrid with something else, as long time readers of the Cryptid History blog will know, Jake doesn’t have time for that silliness. In any case, I love Alligators and other types of Crocodilians, they remind us our place in this world. Sure, we have big brains, and thumbs, and modern technology and guns, but even all those things are not enough to reliably save us from these animals when they are large enough and have the proper disposition. They remind us that the world is a wild place, and that we, despite our advances, are not always the top dog.
Sources and more information
Learn More about the 'Mahamba' here
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