A 4.4 meter-14 3/4’ (or 4.8 meter—15 3/4’, depending whom you believe) saltwater crocodile which had made a habit of menacing schoolchildren for two years in the vicinity of Palumpa, in the Daly River Reserve of Australia’s Northern Territory, kept up its local reign of terror too long. After a final incident of the big croc preventing children crossing a causeway to attend school, police and council members trapped the beast in a local billabong last week and shot him.

ABC Australia

io9

An enterprising crocodile grabs a cape buffalo by the leg, and finds out the hard way why the cape buffalo is regarded by many authorities as very possibly the most dangerous of the Big Five.

Hat tip to Field & Stream.

The Portuguese language news story says:
African toy …... Captured and killed near the border with Angola in Namibia.

Captured 21’ (6.4 m.) saltwater crocodile. The crocodile is suspected of the killing of a 12-year-old girl in 2009 and of a farmer who went missing in July 2011.

Villagers in Bunawan, Philippines last month successfully captured what is believed to be the largest crocodile ever taken alive.

The monster is 21 feet (6.4 m.) long, and weighed in at over a ton (2365 lbs.—1065 kg.). It took more than one hundred men to lift the giant reptile out of the swamp where he was trapped and to get him onto a truck.

The villagers named the crocodile “Lolong” and plan to exhibit him to tourists in a new park built for the purpose. Lolong will be the largest reptile in captivity in the world, so he will probably attract plenty of visitors.

It took about a month, but Lolong resumed eating early in October.

Daily Mail

Picture: Katrina Bridgeford / Rex Features

From the Telegraph:

Pictured above is a saltwater crocodile named Brutus, missing his right front leg, who regularly performs for tourists on the Adelaide River, about 100 km (60 miles) south of Darwin.

Adelaide River Cruises specially advertises jumping crocodile cruises, and the crocs (compensated with free meals of buffalo meat) obligingly perform. Brutus is estimated to be 5.5 meters (18’) long.

The photo has made a sensation, and NT News ran it past a number of experts who basically agree that it has not been Photoshopped.

I want to see the bigger one that took off that front leg.

MSNBC reports that there was only one survivor.

A crocodile stashed in a duffel bag got loose on an airplane, frightened passengers and led to a crash that killed 20 people on board, according to an inquiry into the accident.

The lone survivor of the crash in the Democratic Republic of Congo told the story to investigators, the U.K.’s Telegraph reported on Thursday. A British pilot was among the dead.

The plane was on a routine domestic flight from the capital of Kinshasa to a regional airport in Bandundu when the bizarre tale unfolded on Aug. 25.

An unnamed passenger had hidden the crocodile in a large duffel bag with the intent of selling the reptile, according to the Telegraph. The animal escaped as the plane approached its destination.

Pandemonium ensued.

“The terrified air hostess hurried towards the cockpit, followed by the passengers,” a report obtained by the Telegraph said. The plane then became unstable, “despite the desperate efforts of the pilot.”

The plane crashed into a home a few hundred feet from the airport, though the people who lived in the residence were not in the house.

The crocodile reportedly survived the crash but was killed by a blow from a machete.

Apparently, the rush of 17 passengers and the air hostess to the cockpit unbalanced the plane.

Hat tip to Gizmodo via Karen L. Myers.

photo:Vaclav Silha

London Times:

Czech photographer Vaclav Silha shooting on the banks of the Grumeti River in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania happened to be in the right place at the right time to record a crocodile’s untimely end.

(An) incautious croc (Crocodylus niloticus) got too close to a female (Hippopotamus amphibius) who had calves and the whole group gathered into a defensive circle.

“The crocodile suddenly raced across the backs of the hippos. It might have panicked and thought it was an escape route. It was the worst choice the reptile could ever have made. And it was definitely its last.

“The island of hippos erupted with teeth and all I could see was the crocodile being repeatedly crushed in their huge mouths. His body slipped below the water and I didn’t see him again.”

Photos taken by Hal Brindley in Kruger National Park, South Africa

The Telegraph recently ran some terrific pictures of a leopard taking down a croc.

Via Darren Naish, Steve Bodio, and Karen L. Myers

African video of lions attempting to take young Cape Buffalo.

8:23 video

I think Glenn Reynolds would say that those Cape Buffalo behaved like “a pack, not a herd.”