Saltwater Crocodile
Crocodylus porosus
🐊
Chordata
Reptilia
Crocodilia
Crocodyloidea
Crocodylidae
Crocodylus
Crocodylus porosus
The saltwater monarch of the Indo-Pacific, Crocodylus porosus is the closest thing the modern world has to a living dinosaur—an apex predator that owns every estuary from India to Australia and doesn’t care who knows it.
Description
The saltwater crocodile is the largest living reptile on Earth, equally at home in tropical rivers, coastal deltas, and open sea. Its body is armored in slate-gray scales, its back ridged like a battleship, and its eyes peer from the surface with mechanical patience. This species has been known to cross hundreds of kilometers of ocean, lurking along mangrove coasts, river mouths, and floodplains from Sri Lanka to northern Australia.
It is the ultimate opportunist—feeding on fish, birds, turtles, pigs, and sometimes, regrettably, people. Despite widespread fear, it plays an essential ecological role as a keystone predator in regulating riverine food webs. Its reign is ancient, its design unchanged since the Miocene.
Quick Facts
Max Mass
Shoulder Height
Standing Height
Length
Diet
Trophic Level
1000
0.5
0.75
6
kg
m
m
m
Piscivore
Piscivores
Hunt History
Humans and Crocodylus porosus have been at odds for at least tens of thousands of years. Early Aboriginal Australians depicted crocodiles in rock art, suggesting both reverence and fear. Systematic hunting began in the 19th century, when colonial traders sought its hide, considered the finest of all crocodilian leathers. Between the 1940s and 1970s, unregulated hunting nearly wiped out populations in Southeast Asia and northern Australia. International protection and breeding programs later stabilized numbers, though illegal hunting persists in some regions.
Archaeological and historical evidence of human interaction:
Aboriginal rock art in Arnhem Land (Australia, c. 10,000 BCE) depicts large crocodiles among ritual hunting scenes.
Excavations in Timor and New Guinea reveal crocodile bones with cut marks dating to roughly 5,000 years ago.
Historical accounts from northern Australia (1800s CE) describe commercial hunters taking hundreds annually for export hides.
Time & Range
Extinction Status
Extant
Extinction Date
Temporal Range
Region
0
BP
Late Pleistocene
Australia
Wiki Link
Fat Analysis
Fatness Profile:
High
Fat %
10
Est. Renderable Fat
100
kg
Targeted Organs
Tail fat
Adipose Depots
Tail fat depot, visceral
Preferred Cuts
Tail base
Hunt Difficulty (x/5)
5