The Philippines

The Philippines is two crocodile stories wearing one country. On the coasts and the big rivers lives the saltwater crocodile, the same apex animal that runs from India to the Pacific, and it kills people here as it does everywhere it meets them unprotected. Inland, in a handful of freshwater marshes, lives the Philippine crocodile, Crocodylus mindorensis, a small, shy, endemic species that is among the rarest crocodilians on the planet. It has never harmed anyone. Confusing the two is not a pedant's worry. It gets the harmless one killed, over and over.

Lolong

In September 2011, in the marshes near Bunawan in Agusan del Sur, on the island of Mindanao, hunters and wildlife officers caught a saltwater crocodile that redrew everyone's sense of how big these animals get. Lolong measured six point one seven metres (twenty feet and three inches) and weighed one thousand and seventy-five kilograms, well over a ton. He is still the largest crocodile ever measured in captivity, verified by Guinness World Records. Still the record. He had been hunted for weeks after a girl was taken in the Agusan Marsh in 2009 and a fisherman later disappeared.