In 2008 an archaeologist discovered
crocodiles living in remote caves in Gabon. Now, genetics hint that these weird
cave crocodilians may be in the process of evolving into a new species.
Mon 29 Jan 2018 08.50 GMTLast
modified on Mon 29 Jan 2018 14.44 GMT
It sounds like something out of a children’s
book: it’s orange, it dwells in a cave and it lives on bats and crickets. But
this isn’t some fairy story about a lonely troll – it’s the much weirder tale
of a group of African dwarf crocodiles that are adapting to life in
pitch-darkness.
“We could say that we have a mutating
species, because [the cave crocodile] already has a different [genetic]
haplotype,” said Richard Oslisly, who first discovered the cave crocs in 2008.
“Its diet is different and it is a species that has adapted to the underground
world.”
An archeologist who has long studied Gabon’s
pre-history, Oslisly entered the Abanda Caves in Gabon looking for signs of past humans, such
as rock paintings or engravings. Instead, he found crocodilians in a “great
room…filled with water.”
Two years later he returned with cave scientist,
Olivier Testa, and crocodile specialist, Matthew Shirley. They caught the first
cave crocodile then – and when they carried it outside discovered that its skin
was not the grey (almost bluish grey) of normal African dwarf crocodiles, but
orange.
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