Cassius was captured in the Finniss River in northern Australia.
Photo: FEDERICO PARRA/AFP / Getty Images
An 18-foot-long crocodile, known as the world’s largest, is celebrating what its keepers in Australia believe is its 120th birthday.
He Crocodile that holds the Guinness World Record, called Cassiuswas caught in the Finniss River, in the La Belle Station area of Australia’s Northern Territory, in 1984.
Cassius was captured by a team of scientists after being blamed for a series of cattle deaths in the area.
“He was 16 feet, 10 inches and was missing at least another 6 inches of his tail and a bit of a snout,” Graeme Webb, one of the scientists who captured Cassius, recalled. in an interview with ABC.
The crocodile, which measures something like two ping-pong tables placed end to end, he now lives at Marineland Crocodile Park on Green Island on the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland.
Toody Scott, whose grandfather George Craig bought Cassius and brought him to Green Island in 1987, said that researchers estimate the crocodile to be about 120 years old.
“There’s still a lot of spark in him,” Scott said. “In general, large reptiles tend to be quite docile and uninterested. Cassius is always willing to interact. He is one of our liveliest crocodiles and very attractive.”
Its ancestor, the terrifying “Sarcosuchus imperator” is estimated to have measured up to 40 feet and weighed up to 8 tons.
Sarcosuchus lived 112 million years ago in the middle Cretaceous, making it a contemporary of the more familiar record-breaking reptiles.
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