The Evolution of Crocodiles (Summer Repeat)

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the remarkable diversity of the animals that dominated life on land in the Triassic, before the rise of the dinosaurs in the Jurassic, and whose descendants are often described wrongly as 'living fossils'. For tens of millions of years, the ancestors of alligators and Nile crocodiles included some as large as a bus, some running on two legs like a T Rex and some that lived like whales. They survived and rebounded from a series of extinction events but, while the range of habitats of the dinosaur descendants such as birds covers much of the globe, those of the crocodiles have contracted, even if the animals themselves continue to evolve today as quickly as they ever have. With Anjali Goswami Research Leader in Life Sciences and Dean of Postgraduate Education at the Natural History Museum Philip Mannion Lecturer in the Department of Earth Sciences at University College London And Steve Brusatte Professor of Palaeontology and Evolution at the University of Edinburgh Producer Simon Tillotson

Transcript

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0:28.5	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:32.4	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:35.8	In our time is on its annual break.
0:38.0	And we'll be back on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds on the 14th of September.
0:43.0	Until then, each week we're offering an episode from our archive of nearly 1,000 programs,
0:47.8	which I hope you'll enjoy. Have a good summer.
0:51.8	Hello, before the rise of the dinosaurs,
0:54.0	the dominant land animals were crocs,
0:55.9	the academic catch-all name for ancestors with the alligators and crocodiles
0:59.6	that lurk by the waters edge today among the reefs.
1:02.9	That was truly the age of the croc.
1:05.1	They were once crocs as large as T-Rex, some 10 meters long,
1:08.6	some running up right on two legs, some with hooves,
1:11.3	some in the oceans as big as a whale.
1:13.6	And their prominence was lower overlooked by those who treated crocodiles on Earth
1:17.9	now as living fossils,
	...

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