Mick Hartley

Here’s something you don’t see very often:

A crocodile survived a fall from the 12th floor of a block of flats in Russia after trying to escape through a window.

Diving out of the window has become a habit for the crocodile, called Khenar, with concerned neighbours saying it was the third time the animal had used that method to flee.

It lost a tooth in the latest fall but was otherwise unscathed. “It seems the owner was not at home when the crocodile came out of the window,” a spokesman for the emergencies ministry in Nizhny Novgorod said.

The crocodile was put in a local aquarium to recover from its fall. Within a few hours, its concerned owner came to pick it up and the reptile was last seen being driven away, lying on the back seat of its owner’s car.

[Fresh ideas for children’s books just keep on coming. “Khenar was bored with crawling around like all the other crocodiles. Why can’t we fly, like the birds? he asked his mother. Shh now Khenar! We’re crocodiles. Crawling around is what we do. But Khenar wasn’t happy. He knew one day he’d fly….”]