Already home when the sky fell: warm refuges may explain how crocodiles outlived the dinosaurs

When an asteroid struck 66 million years ago, the non-bird dinosaurs vanished — but crocodiles' relatives endured. A team led by University College London may now have found a big part of the reason: home address. The researchers analysed more than 7,000 fossils and records covering over 400 living and extinct species across about 245 million years, and found the crocodile lineage never really adapted to the cold — it simply followed warmth around the planet as climates shifted. After the impact, their models show, tropical and subtropical regions stayed liveable even as much of the world turned hostile, giving the survivors sheltered places to hold on and recover. Only the most extreme climate scenarios erased those refuges. The study, published in Science Advances, is a model-based explanation rather than proof — but it reframes survival itself: sometimes the winners are not the toughest, just the ones already living in the right place.