There have been some whopping great animals that have crawled, waddled, flapped, and even swum their way over planet Earth across many thousands of years. While the biggest animal to ever live is still swimming about in our oceans, some individual species go unrecognized in the history books for their achievements. Meet the (allegedly) largest alligator ever found.
The great big alligator was discovered in Louisiana in 1890 and was reportedly a massive 5.85 meters (19 feet, 2 inches) long. To put that in context, basketball player Shaquille O’Neal is 2.16 meters (7.1 feet), so this alligator was more than double his height.
However, despite the enormous length of the beast, its size was never actually verified.
The story goes that the alligator was killed on Marsh Island by a 17-year-old named Edward “Ned” Avery McIlhenny. Allegedly, McIlhenny discovered the animal while shooting geese in the swamp. He killed the creature because he believed it was dying from cold exposure anyway.
He returned with two friends the next day to try and move the alligator out of the water so it could be skinned. However, because it was so large and in a boggy area, the trio was unable to move it.
“Using the barrel of his shotgun, which he knew to be thirty inches long, he measured the alligator three times. He then declared the total length to be nineteen feet, two inches,” explains Country Roads Magazine. Not the most rigorous approach, but it seems no one ever went back to check more thoroughly.
While there is a chance that McIlhenny might have not been entirely truthful with his recording of the length of the alligator, he did go on to become a keen naturalist as well as a businessman (his family founded the company that makes Tabasco sauce), and even wrote a book about alligators titled The Alligator’s Life History, which was published in 1935.
A more recent example of a giant alligator comes from Mississippi, where a giant 4.3-meter (14 feet, 3 inches) alligator was captured in 2023. The animal weighed 364 kilograms (802.5 pounds) and was captured in August of that year during Mississippi’s alligator hunting season.
It would be remiss not to at least mention the crocodiles too. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest living crocodile is a saltwater dweller named Cassius, who measures 5.48 meters (17 feet, 11.75 inches) and resides at the Australian wildlife zoo Marineland Melanesia.
The largest crocodile ever to have been in captivity was a 6.17 meter (20 feet, 2.91 inches) saltwater crocodile named Lolong, who was captured in the Philippines back in September 2011, later dying in February 2013.
