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Man-Eating Reptiles
Not for the Squeamish – Some of the Pictures of People Pieces are Very Graphic!
People
always have had a morbid fascination with being eaten by other animals. It probably reaches its height with large
constricting snakes like the anaconda, retic, Burmese, and rock python. People seem to find regugnant the idea of a
snake eating an animal whole. Some
individuals, who can watch a nature documentary where wolves or lions tear
their prey to bits and sometimes eat it alive, often are revolted to see a
python eat a dead rat. As it turns out,
no confirmed instances of a snake successfully feeding on a person exist. Rare cases of large constricters killing
humans are known. And of course,
venomous snakes commonly kill people, 10 to 25 a year in the U.S. alone and around
30,000 worldwide. Children and tropical
areas where people go barefoot have the highest mortality rates from
snakebite. Still, death from snakebite
is rare; dogs, horses, invertebrates (bees, spiders, and scorpions especially),
and lightning all kill more people than snakes.
Soooo,
the ultimate question is: In the entire
one- to two-million-year history of the human species has a large snake ever
fed successfully on a person? Well,
why not? People used to be much smaller
and less sophisticated than they are now.
Snakes used to be much larger and more common than they are now. Large constrictors and humans probably had
considerably more frequent encounters in our not too distant past when the odds
were much better for the snakes.
People, particularly youngsters and infants, would be expected to have
made appropriate occasional food items for large constrictors in our
prehistory.
Crocodilians,
on the other hand, have no problem with killing and eating people, now or in
the past. Many documented cases
exist. Nile crocodiles, saltwater or
estuarine crocodiles, Indian muggers, American, Cuban and Orinoco crocodiles,
black caimans, Siamese and New Guinea crocodiles, and American alligators grow
to large sizes and represent the primary culprits. The freshwater or Johnstone’s crocodiles on the TV show Survivor
are harmless fisheaters, one of the Lassies of crocodilians. Of course, crocs and gators don’t eat people
whole, but tear chunks off and swallow them.
The
crocs we have today are dwarves compared to some of the extinct species. Deinosuchus (terrible crocodile) or Phobosuchus
(fearsome crocodile) grew to 45 feet and 15 tons. A skull of Phobosuchus in the American Museum measures 6
feet long and 3 feet wide with the largest teeth being 6 inches long and 2
inches thick. Alistair Graham (1973,
Eyelids of Morning) describes this croc as “one of the few animals that swapped
hunting yarns with Tyrannosaurus rex …”. Us herpers can only dream of such leviathans.
Snake Stories Crocodilian Stories