Biologists Just Found Out What the Alligators in Louisiana Actually Are

Roughly two million American alligators live in Louisiana's coastal marsh, and for a hundred years everyone who managed, studied, hunted and farmed them agreed on what they were: a freshwater reptile, a swamp predator, a tidy conservation success story. That picture has come apart over the past decade — not because a new species turned up, but because researchers finally checked two things nobody had properly looked at: what these animals eat, and what their DNA says about where they came from.