The skeleton of Oscar is being assembled and will be put on display like a museum dinosaur. The 14-foot, 1,000-pound alligator had roamed the swamp from the time the park opened in 1946.
As his bones show, Oscar was a tough customer, surviving a shotgun blast to the face, at least three bullet wounds, broken bones and arthritis. Gators have been known to live for decades, and by some estimates, Oscar was a particularly ancient 95 to 100 years old when he died last summer.
The display also will include what park officials found in Oscar's belly - including a plastic dog collar, a dog's tag, a penny and the top section of a flagpole.
"Some people think he's a statue," a tour guide, Danny Rowe, said of Oscar in 1996. "I tell people he's real, but I don't get paid enough to show them he's real."
The Okefenokee is a 438,000-acre National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Georgia that attracts 350,000 to 400,000 visitors a year. During the first years of the park's operation, alligator wrestling was a popular attraction, park officials have said. That ended in the mid-1950s when, it is said, one of the gators rolled over on a park manager and broke the man's arm.
The other famous Okefenokee alligator is fictional: a cigar-smoking critter named Albert in the late Walt Kelly's long-running comic strip, Pogo.
