Zach Fitzner - Tears for Crocodilia: Evolution, Ecology, and the Disappearance of One of the Worlds Most Ancient Animals

THE INSPIRATION TO WRITE THIS BOOK came from my firsthand experiences with crocodilian fossils. I worked for years in a business where the skeleton of a giant crocodilian (Deinosuchus sp.) lurked in the corner of a side building. Occasionally when I passed by, I would stop and ponder this specter of the distant past. Another experience that haunted me was a childhood stop at the Okefenokee Swamp on a family road trip to Disney World. I remember little of Mickey Mouse, but I can still picture an enormous alligator lying in the water in the rain as the child I was stared with awe.

More recently, I was volunteering at Aransas Wildlife Refuge in Texas on my own time in exchange for a free RV spot and the opportunity to observe wild alligators and their habitat. While I was at Aransas I called up Tom Lindgren of Geo Dcor, a paleontology company in Tucson, Arizona, where I had done fossil preparation work in the past. Lindgren told me about a Eocene crocodilian just discovered that summer in Wyoming. That crocodilian ended up being a large fossil preparation project for me, taking up almost as much time and effort as writing this book.

Texas wasnt the last trip I made while researching this book. I traveled to Nepal to find the rare, long-snouted crocodilian gharials and mugger crocodiles in the jungle. In South Carolina I volunteered for alligator behavioral research on golf courses. I canoed Okefenokee in Georgia and I visited the Everglades to see the environment American alligators and American crocodiles share. This is the only place where knowing what is the difference between crocodiles and alligators is useful because you might see both animals. Even in the Everglades, crocodiles, with their more pointed snouts and toothier closed mouths, mostly stay out of alligators fresh water, opting for salt.

Most of the time I was writing this book, I was also working on the Wyoming crocodilian fossil at Geo Dcor in Tucson. Day after day I sat hunched before a vertical slab of stone higher and wider than I am tall, held in a steel support frame. First, with an air-powered chisel I chipped away at the tan-colored stone. Later I blasted the fossil clean with a stylus shooting a stream of white powderdolomiteto reveal bones ranging from milk chocolate to dark chocolate tones in color. The skull appeared bit by bit, teeth stabbing out at me. The twist of spine, curving and broken appeared like a dark pagan tattoo, thorned with chevrons inked into the pale flesh of rock. Day after day I sat by a garage door, fans blowing over me, forcing the dust outside; although much circled back, settled onto the floor, into my hair, onto my face, and all over my clothes.

The work was like a long road triplots of sitting with occasional small movements. There were also many things to discover beneath each layer of rock peeled back. Slowly, over long months stretching to more than half a year, the strange skeletal form of the crocodilian was revealed, a relic of a massive tropical Wyoming lake. Seeing the small details made all the work, the days of monotony, heat, and dust, worth it.

When I realized that my interest in crocodilians was leading to writing a book, I wanted to add to my firsthand experience of the subject. To that end, I traveled to places where crocodilians live today and where fossils have been found. I also dug out my oldjournals from a college field course in Ecuador where I observed caimans, tropical relatives of alligators, as well as worked with ancient crocodilians preserved in stone. I supplemented my own experiences with interviews I conducted with biologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, and zookeepers. Sources consulted for each chapterbooks, scientific papers, and websitesare listed at the back of this volume.

The truth is, crocodilians are beyond human understanding. We humans have a hard time understanding the unique struggles, triumphs, and stories of people with different skin colors, languages, or nationalities; how much harder is it to understand a different species entirely? In this book Ive used not only the narrow lens of biology and paleontology but also myth and anthropology. Perhaps imagination can bridge gaps that science alone cannot. I hope what Ive written here will inspire deeper reflection on the world we live in and the creatures we share it withespecially those that are scaly and dangerous.

This is Borealosuchus sp., a crocodilian I prepared in Tucson, Arizona, viewed from the ventral side (except for the head which is twisted). At this point this side is only partially prepared as you can see from the tail. Borealosuchus is an extinct genus of crocodyliforms, this specimen lived in the Eocene of subtropical Wyoming. (Geo Dcor)