Crocodile

Crocodile’s lose and grow new teeth all the time. One can go through thousands in a lifetime. However,crocs rarely chew their food. They use their powerful jaws to catch prey and their teeth to impale it, but they swallow most of their food whole.

While the skin on a croc’s belly is thin and soft, the rest of its body is heavily armored with a bony element inside each scale. Also in the skin on its back a crocodile has stuctures that gather and hold heat, a form of solar power for this cold-blooded reptile.

Sensory cells in the skin around a crocodile’s mouth are believed to help find prey underwater, where its vision is poor. These cells seem to be able to detect subtle pressure changes in the water, which direct the crocodile to the prey’s movements.

Crocodiles's eyes have excellent vision, day and night, but they don’t cry crocodile tears. They do have top and bottom eyelids, along with a third eyelid that sweeps across the surface of the eye to both clean and protect it when the crocodile submerges.

Crocodile’s jaws have extremely strong muscles for closing down on prey. The muscles that open their jaws, however, are so weak they can be held closed with a rubber band. They also have flaps of skin in the back of the throat that allows them to hold prey in their mouths underwater.

Some crocodiles can actually gallop away from danger at speeds between 10 to 11 miles per hour.