I know what you are thinking. “What is this clickbait trash and who do you think you are kidding?” See that’s a big wet finger “one” on the chalkboard for me.

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Ok so it is not strictly true.....but it sorta is. You see crocodiles don’t age or rather their cells don’t. This means that a 70 year old croc is just as sprightly as a 2 year old. No grandma croc is ever going to need a walking stick so even if she is tucked in bed with a bonnet and glasses, looking decidedly sleepy she is still able to whup out of bed and gobble you up before you can say “My grandma what a big nose you have”.

The scientific term for this is negligible senescence. So how come you don’t see really old crocs? Well there are several reasons.

1. They can still be killed by predators.
2. Disease kills them.
3. They do dumb things and die.
4. Humans are complete bar stewards.
5. They starve to death.

The first three are pretty self explanatory. The fourth one is too but it helps to explain a little. The invention of the accurate big bore rife in the mid to late 1800s meant that even the most useless dweeby human could go hunting with a minimal risk of getting eaten, stomped on or tossed around like a rag doll. That is exactly what they did. If it moved they shot it and if they couldn’t eat it or sell it they had it hung on their wall. Crocodile head plaques aren’t that common but croc shoes and handbags were all the rage. that pretty much wiped out all the really old ones.

Number 5 on the list is starvation. Not only do crocs not age but they keep on growing. So the bigger a croc is the older it is and they can get stupidly big. The pic below is one shot in 1957 in Australia

Tiddles 120 years after being dropped down the toilet

That is small dinosaur size right? What with all the poisonous snakes, spiders, great whites, box jellies someone really wanted to keep humans out of Australia.

The main problem about getting big is that you need more food to keep you alive. Eventually there comes a point that you can’t catch it fast enough, an injury slows you down a tad and you starve to death - yeah pleasant :P What about in zoos then? Believe it or not but when their keepers have died the crocs have, tadaaa, ended up starving to death. It is only recently people have realized this and from now on are going to keep an eye on food intake.

Humans on the other hand are senescent which means our cells have a limited lifespan and can only divide so many times. As you may know every time a cell divides telomeres on DNA get shorter until there is nothing left and that is your lot. This is called the Hayflick Limit. What you may not know is that there is an enzyme called telomerase (AKA terminal transferase) which will lengthen the telomeres and in theory allow you to live longer avoiding the Hayflick Limit. Unfortunately this isn’t the golden goose egg for immortality as it is a little tricky to control. In fact if you find lots of it inhuman cells it means they are cancerous .....bummer.

Still that doesn’t mean that we won’t get better control in the future. In fact it is being suggested that if you are 20 today you will probably be the last generation of people to grow old and die.

Not so sure I would like to live to be really old though. Remember I said crocs don’t stop growing? Well in humans your feet, noses and ears don’t stop growing so we will all end up looking like this guy with clown sized feet!

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