Critically Endangered
West African slender-snouted crocodile
Mecistops cataphractus
West African slender-snouted crocodile is an animal in the family Crocodylidae — Mecistops cataphractus, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
As with its relative, the West African slender-snouted crocodile has a very long, slender snout that it uses to catch fish and small aquatic invertebrates. It is one of five species of crocodile in Africa, the other four being the Central African slender-snouted, Nile, West African and dwarf crocodiles. The slender-snouted crocodile (M. Cataphractus) was thought to be distributed across west Africa and into central Africa but the central African species has been separated as the Central African slender-snouted crocodile (M. Leptorhynchus) based on studies in 2014 and 2018 that indicated that both were distinct species.
Three individuals measuring 2.31 to 2.62 m (7 ft 7 in – 8 ft 7 in) and weighing 50–95 kg (110–209 lb) had a bite force in the range of 1,704–2,447 N (383–550 lbf).
Range and habitat
West African slender-snouted crocodile occurs widely in West Africa (Benin, Burkina Faso, southern Senegal, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, southern Mali, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Togo) and extends into Cameroon in Central Africa. The two species diverged about 6.5–7.5 mya, living in different river drainage zones that were geographically separated from each other by the Cameroon Line.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
In crisis
West African slender-snouted crocodile is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on West African slender-snouted crocodile, Wikidata item Q268501. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
