In January, the Australian Reptile Park brought us a king brown snake's first yawn-like breath, and this month we get to watch a hatchling of a different sort: a baby alligator emerging from the egg in all of its adorable gooeyness.


The park has welcomed 25 new arrivals – and staff are pretty excited. "Baby alligators hatching at the Australian Reptile Park yesterday! Looks like a scene out of Jurassic Park!" the team announced in a Facebook update last week.

Those high-pitched "yerps" you hear definitely up the cuteness quotient – and in the wild, they also serve an important purpose. The yerping chorus begins when the hatchlings are ready to emerge from their eggs, and it alerts their mother (who keeps watch for the 65 days or so of incubation) that it's time to open up the nest. 

“On the magic morning, you hear their little calls before they even get out of the eggs,” the park's general manager, Tim Faulkner, tells The Daily Telegraph. “They’ll sit there for a little while as they take their first breaths. Once they push their head and first leg out, that seems to be the catalyst for ‘right, I’m out of here’ and they wobble out.”

The park's new arrivals are all male. Since the sex of an alligator embryo is determined by the temperature at which the egg is incubated, staff at the park were able to ensure a male batch by keeping things at a toasty 32°C (90°F) – temperatures below 30°C produce female hatchlings.

Australia has no native alligators of its own, but it is home to two species of crocodiles: the supersized saltie (Crocodylus porosus) and a much smaller (and endemic) freshwater crocodile, Crocodylus johnstoni.