Crocodilia is an order of mostly large, predatory, semiaquatic reptiles, known as crocodilians. The order includes the true crocodiles, the alligators and caimans, and the gharial and false gharials. They are largely carnivorous, the various species feeding on animals such as fish, crustaceans, molluscs, birds, and mammals.
About Crocodilia in brief
Crocodilia is an order of mostly large, predatory, semiaquatic reptiles, known as crocodilians. The order Crocodilia includes the true crocodiles, the alligators and caimans, and the gharial and false gharials. They are largely carnivorous, the various species feeding on animals such as fish, crustaceans, molluscs, birds, and mammals. They have a four-chambered heart and, somewhat like birds, a unidirectional looping system of airflow within the lungs, but like other non-avian reptiles they are ectotherms. Crocodilians are found mainly in lowlands in the tropics, but alligators also live in the southeastern United States and the Yangtze River in China. Humans are the greatest threat to crocodilian populations through activities that include hunting, poaching, and habitat destruction. The Nile crocodile is the only crocodile known to have attacked humans. The name may refer to the animal’s habit of basking on the basking shores of the Nile, in the area of Paleoscytos, on the Nile River. The word crocodile means both lizard and lizard-like, and Crocodylia, as coined by Wermuth, in regards to the genus CroCodylus, appears to be derived from the ancient Greek shingle or pebble—and shingle means “shingle” or shingle-and-shingle.
The term crocodile appears in the Latin word crocodilia, which means “lizard” or “worm” in the Greek Κράξ, which may be a Latinization of the Greek ωδά crocodile, or “crocodylus”, which means lizard-lizard or lizard-worm or “cocodile” The name crocodilian is also used in the neontological literature to refer to a species of crocodile that lived in the same area as the Nile crocodiles, such as the crocodile in the U.S. and the crocodiles in South Africa. It has been used interchangeably for decades starting with Schmidt’s redescription of the group from the formerly defunct term Loricata. Prior to 1988, Cro codiliaCrocodylia was a group that encompassed the modern-day animals as well as their more distant relatives now in the larger groups called Croc Codylomorpha and Pseudosuchia. This distinction is more important for paleontologists studying crocodilian evolution such, such, as the alternate spellings Crocodilias and Crocodiles are still used in neontologists’ literature. It was not until the advent of cladistics and phylogenetic nomenclature that a more solid justification for assuming one spelling over the other was proposed. It is the proper name for this redescribed group, basing it on the type genusCrocodylus.
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This page is based on the article Crocodilia published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 02, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
