Writeblr, langlr, jumblr.

isn’t he beautiful

listen to the SOUND when he bites

He is NOT, however, either the largest crocodile ever captured in Australia OR the largest ever in captivity.

A slightly larger crocodile has been reported (though not yet comfirmed) to have been captured at 5.58 meters.

And while the famous Brutus of the Adelaide River was estimated to be just slightly larger than Cassius at 5.5m, he was driven out of his territory by a younger and even larger crocodile, who as a result has been given the name, The Dominator.  He is estimated to be just over 6m.

This is Brutus, with an appropriate caption:

It is believed that he lost that arm in a fight with a Bull Shark.  

The Bull Shark lost.

THIS is the crocodile who kicked him out.  The Dominator:

And that’s STILL not the biggest.  

The largest living crocodile ever reliably measured was Lolong, who for the 1.5 years between his capture and his death was the largest crocodile ever held in captivity, at a whopping 6.17 meters (20 feet 3 inches) and 1075 kg (2,370 lbs).  He had been feeding on both humans and very large livestock in the Bunawan creek in Agusan del Sur in the Philippines.  It took 100 people all night to drag him to shore during his capture.

And here’s why:

Since then Brutus developed a habit of hunting and eating Bull Sharks.

Here’s him with a prey.

And if you thought that you’ll be safe if you just stay out of Australia then think again!

Meet Gustave the Nile Croc.

This crocodile became almost legendary for both it’s size and the habit of hunting both livestock AND humans.

So how big is Gustave?

No one is sure. Since he was NEVER captured.

His estimated size is of at least 5,5m  but some give him over 6m.

The terrifying parts are:

1) He is still growing having only about 60 years.

2) Adult crocodiles often perform a gesture of submission to him - something usually done by young crocodiles toward adults - Gustave is just THAT BIG.

3) His sheer size makes it difficult for him to catch agile prey Nile crocs tend to feed on - hence why he developed a habit of hunting either larger prey like Hippopotamus or creatures which are not good at spotting danger in the first place like livestock and humans.

And this is NOT ALL.

Gustave actually has a noticeable scars on his body - he was shot at east 3 times and stabbed with a spear or something similar at one occasion.

He lived to tell the tale - my question is:

What happened to that one dude who attacked Gustave with a spear?

THIS is Gustave:

And he is the PERFECT CROCODILE.  He is the perfect example of what I mean when I talk about (as I do) how the morphology of extremely large crocodiles adapts to the changing physics of their bite.

This is a typical adult Nile Crocodile:

And THIS is a god among his kind:

This is it, folks.  The Final Form.  THIS is what peak performance looks like.

Crocodiles and physics have an interesting relationship.  Crocodiles have, by a CONSIDERABLE MARGIN, the strongest bite of any animal on Earth.  EVER.  Scaled up estimates (based on Nile and Saltwater crocodiles) give the extinct Deinosuchus an estimated bite force MORE THAN DOUBLE the recently updated Tyrannosaurus bite estimates.  Living crocodiles have bite forces measured in the range of 5000 pounds per square inch, for an individual around 15-16 feet.  It is estimated that modern crocodiles in the range of 18-20 feet would have bit forces around 7-8000 psi or more.

That’s a problem.

Because a crocodile’s skull is only designed to handle so much pressure.  Go beyond that limit and the force of impact when those jaws snap shut could literally shatter their own skulls.

But evolution has spent hundreds of millions of years perfecting crocodiles, so PHYSICS ISN’T GOING TO STOP THEM.  What ends up happening in the skulls of these extremely large crocodiles is they will increase dramatically in mass to compensate for the increased forces.  A crocodile’s skull is almost exclusively solid bone, with only minimal space for nasal passages, a surprisingly advanced brain, and some slightly porous looking framework that helps the bone distribute the force over a larger area.  The effect is by far the most pronounced in Nile crocodiles, which most regularly feed on larger prey and need to make use of all that power.

Compare, 26 inch skull:

vs 29 inch skull:

Both of those are Nile crocodile skulls (or rather, replicas thereof).

And just for fun, here are the skulls of completely different (and very extinct species), Deinosuchus:

and Purussaurus:

The bigger the crocodile (within a given species), the more massive the skull needs to be to compensate for that UNBELIEVABLE bit pressure.  This is one way to see from a distance whether you are looking at a normal sized crocodile:

and a truly extraordinary individual:

One of the things about Gustave that’s so impressive is how healthy his teeth look.  A lot of large crocodiles, in their old age, have very worn down and often missing teeth.  They do replace them many times over a lifetime, but when they get very old this slows down.  Gustave, at least in every picture taken of him, had teeth that were in very good condition.

Even crocodiles much smaller than Gustave’s reported size (probably similar in size to Dominator or Lolong) tend to have smaller or more worn teeth:

than the pinnacle of his kind:

If you're on twitter or threads or reddit, and you say, "Oh, I had a terrible experience with Delta Airlines. They canceled my flight and then booked me into a hotel room with a stranger," and you tag Delta, there's a chance Delta Airlines itself will come and apologize. Maybe even give you some SkyMiles or something.

But if you complain about a terrible airline experience on tumblr, all you can hope for is that someone might come along and write slash fiction about two guys who get booked into the same hotel room by Delta Airlines.

You can't gain social capital by being here. Nobody knows who you even ARE because your user name is, like, some randomly generated phrase or else an obscure reference to hockey sex books.

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

-Daniel Cawdrey (his translation choices make me bite-y)

-Philippe Ariès (never defines western, but nonetheless uses it in ways that make me want to scream)

Do you actually believe that putting a blanket ban over scheduling events on Saturday is a reasonable request? Because that would mean non Jews would have to follow a religious law or a religion they don’t belong to!!

The doesn’t revolve around you!!!

Me: Hey you know scheduling things on Saturday is inconvenient for Jews and anyone who works on Saturday

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

Intellectually, I know there are theoretically ethical, reasonable, and appropriate things we can do under the vague "AI" banner at a museum/archive. In practice, I do not think most (if any) generative AI is a good idea at museums and archives.

I have a few thoughts.

Most of what is produced, particularly when we're talking about generative AI through LLMs, is just garbage though, so fairly or unfairly, my association with "oh we used AI" is suspicion at best and garbage at worst. It doesn't read as "we used this fancy tool, we're with the times" it makes me question if there's an AI-dependency issue there. I have colleagues and mentors who use AI in limited ways that I think are Fine, I Guess, even if I wouldn't personally. There are case uses, particularly in processing massive amounts of data that hey, I get it. But by volume, most of what I see both inside and outside the academy from LLMs is garbage. Saying "we used AI" in a general vague sense is not a selling point because unless I have reason to believe otherwise, it's probably crap generated by a hype machine. It makes me take you less seriously.

I'm less curmudgeonly if you can specifically say what you use "AI" for and why. Like if you have 50K records and you're figuring out how many borough salesmen named Jack are listed, I'm not going to be a jackass and insist someone count by hand. There are case uses, and I'm going to react differently to "we did x using y" than a wholesale buy-in to the hype machine.

I'm not fond of how GenAI is impacting communication (written and oral). I don't think any individual institution has the responsibility to fight this alone, but I'm going to take you less seriously if you're contributing to this. The same goes for the normalization of GenAI as a thing everyone "needs." It's not a need for the museum or me.

Proud, widespread use of GenAI at an institution makes me wonder how engaged your staff is with the material. Maybe that's not fair, but if I see a lot of generated text, generated images, or generated audio it would make me wonder. I also don't want to go to an archive, ask for human expertise, and get directed to the bot. If that happens, I'm going to think there isn't any human expertise to be found.

Maybe your staff is all great about checking behind AI's work, but most human's default setting seems to be not doing that. How many lawyers have been caught out on non-existent citations, doctors on impossible diagnoses, reporters with false claims, students leaving prompts in? Do you really trust all your interns and coworkers and admin that much? Volunteers, if they get access to it?