Some recent croc encounter
Ive been on „vacation“ last week which honestly was mostly taking a friend to various zoos and aquariums across Austria, but that did lead me to getting to see a fair share of crocs in a fairly short time span.
Right on day 2 it was another meeting with Leila, the female Mecistops that resides in Viennas aquarium. This is now my second time seeing her and shes still a beauty.
A day later we visited the House of Nature museum in Salzburg, which had just opened its new reptile halls. As part of the makeover, which focused a lot on cohabitation and larger, natural exhibits, the museum had go part with its American Alligator that had simply become too large. While I did subsequently miss out on seeing it again after like two decades, they did get a new crocodilian in its place, a much more manageable dwarf crocodile.
The first room furthermore featured two skulls, one of a crocodile and one of a gharial, nicely highlighting the diversity of modern crocodilians. Downstairs in the dinosaur hall they also displayed the skeleton of Macrospondylus, but given how common fossils of that animal are I wont dwell on it beyond saying that its size was rather impressive.
Skipping ahead a few days brought us back to Salzburg, this time to the zoo just outside the city. While featuring nothing too large, the jaguar house still showcased a crocodilian, specifically a dwarf caiman. Alas, despite stopping by around 5 times, it was less cooperative in terms of posing than my previous two encounters. Still, the enclosure was quite nice and featured some cohabitation with basilisk lizards and bats (that I sadly couldn't find).
The last zoo of the week was in Schmieding in Upper Austria. Now when I was a kid they had a nile and, in the adjacent aquarium, some spectacled caimans. However nowadays they scaled down, having moved the caimans into the old nile crocodile pool in the rainforest house. Funny enough they were the only ones on the trip to have been on land, tho they were looking a little rough if truth be told.
And that was it in broad strokes. Some were certainly more exciting than others, Leila remains a stand out and the new Salzburg Osteolaemus was nice to see. Obviously the trips featured a lot of other interesting stuff from 9 meter sturgeon models in Bratislava to free roaming ringtail lemurs and stuffed rhinogrades in Salzburg and plenty more, but alas all four species encountered were animals I have seen before, so I don't get to cross anything off my list this time around.
