Living Fossil to Comeback

The Ancient Survivor

A reptile out of time

Alligators are genuinely ancient. The lineage that became alligators and caimans split from the crocodile family roughly 87 million years ago, and the first true members of the genus Alligator appear around 37 million years ago. The American alligator itself has changed remarkably little: research from the Florida Museum of Natural History found it has remained essentially unchanged for at least eight million years. As paleontologist Evan Whiting put it:

"If we could step back in time 8 million years, you'd basically see the same animal crawling around then as you would see today in the Southeast."— Evan Whiting, Florida Museum of Natural History

A Name Borrowed Twice

"The lizard," in two languages

The word "alligator" is a happy accident of translation. Spanish explorers in the New World called it el lagarto — "the lizard" — which English speakers slurred into "allagarta" and then "alligator" by the 1620s. South Louisiana borrowed its own version from Spanish cocodrilo: in Cajun French, an alligator is a "cocodrie" — a word that survives today as the name of a fishing village on the coast below Houma.

Long before either tongue arrived, Louisiana's Native peoples lived alongside the animal. According to historical accounts, the Atakapa ate its meat and used alligator oil for cooking and as a mosquito repellent, while the Chitimacha hunted it for food and used alligator hides in regalia signaling leadership. The alligator was woven into bayou life from the very start.

The Hide Boom

Three and a half million hides

Alligator skin was being made into boots, shoes and saddles in America by about 1800, and during the Civil War it was turned into saddles and boots for Confederate troops. But the real boom began in 1876, when manufacturers in New York and New Jersey started buying Louisiana skins for boots, shoes and purses — and others bought alligator oil to grease machinery. Professional hunting exploded.

It could not last. Where hides once came from a seemingly endless wild supply, today they come from a tightly regulated harvest and from farms — the difference between an unregulated rush and a managed resource.

The Brink

The marsh goes quiet

Decades of unregulated market hunting, plus habitat loss, did exactly what you'd expect. By the mid-1900s Louisiana's wild population had crashed to under 100,000 animals. The state closed the alligator season entirely from 1962 to 1972, and in 1967 the American alligator was declared endangered under federal protection. A creature that had outlasted saber-toothed cats was, suddenly, almost gone.

The Comeback

"Use it to save it"

What happened next is the part worth remembering. Louisiana reopened a tiny, tightly controlled experimental hunt in Cameron Parish in 1972 — just 1,350 alligators taken by 59 hunters — and built outward from there into one of the most studied sustainable-use programs on earth.

The result: from fewer than 100,000 wild alligators to more than three million today, plus roughly a million on farms — a recovery widely cited as one of America's great endangered-species success stories. The trick was making the living animal and its wetland worth more alive than gone. (For the leather side of that story, see the heritage of Louisiana leather and why traceability protects the species.)

An Official Icon

The state reptile

In 1983, Louisiana named the American alligator its official state reptile. It's celebrated in coastal culture and festivals — the Louisiana Fur & Wildlife Festival in Cameron, "one of the oldest and coldest" in the state, has honored the trapping and wildlife heritage since 1955 — and it lives on in folklore, from Choctaw creation myths to the Cajun legend of the Letiche. From near-silence in the marsh to the seal of the state, the alligator's comeback is, in every sense, a Louisiana story.

Sources: LDWF, "Alligator Management" (wlf.louisiana.gov); U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service; Florida Museum of Natural History, "A Reptilian Anachronism"; Louisiana Sportsman; State Symbols USA; Louisiana Fur & Wildlife Festival. Native-history details are drawn from historical accounts and tribal histories. Next: meet the animal →