Hunters bag 920-pound ‘dinosaur’ alligator: ‘I thought I was going to die’

Thought last week’s Mississippi monster was impressive?

A team of hunters put those gator grabbers to shame after hauling a more than 900-pound “dinosaur” gator from a Florida lake, as seen in jaw-dropping videos and photos making waves online.

“I had fear like I never felt before,” Kevin Grotz, an outdoorsman who runs the outfit Florida Gator Hunting, told Orlando station WESH 2 of corralling the huge beast.

Weighing a whopping 920 pounds and measuring 13.3 feet long, the gatorzilla was the second largest specimen ever harvested in the state — with the biggest weighing 1,000 pounds.

The lifelong Floridian said he’d never “experienced anything like this” in his 20 years as a charter boat captain.

Grotz and his team found the behemoth reptile in a lake near an Orlando population hub and knew they had to remove it to keep people safe.

“Ultimately, if a beast of that size gets a hold of you or, God forbid, a child, the odds are tough,” said Grotz, who got to work removing the gargantuan gator right away.

Wrassling the reptile was no small feat.

“Honestly, my first concern was safety because we were in a smaller boat,” Grotz said. “And then you add a gator whose head is this big. All he has to do is turn, and we’re in trouble.”

Like Captain Quint and crew pursuing the great white in “Jaws,” the extreme gator hunter knew he had to “be smart” and “play this safe,” adding that he fortunately “couldn’t have been with better people.”

In the accompanying footage, Grotz and company can be seen battling the colossal critter, which appears to be longer than their rickety fishing boat.

At long last, they lasso the beast and lash it to the side of the vessel so its giant jaws leer at the camera.

“When we saw this gator, it was way bigger than anything we’ve ever caught before,” exclaimed fellow gator hunter Darren Field, who compared their quarry to a “giant dinosaur.”

The battle reportedly took Grotz and his team a whopping four hours to catch the behemoth — a tug of war that left them dead tired.

“I laid down in the front of the boat and said, ‘All right, I have to lay down until we get back,’ because I thought I was going to die,” said friend Carson Gore while recalling the interspecies heavyweight bout.

Accompanying photos show the team using a rope to hoist up the modern-day dinosaur, which is so massive it looks like it could be Photoshopped.

In fact, it was more than a hundred pounds larger than the 800-pound “nightmare” gator bagged last week in Mississippi, where it set the new state record.

Meanwhile, the biggest alligator ever recorded was a 15-foot, 1,011.5-pound giant that was caught in Alabama in 2014.

The team wasn’t bagging the alligator to sate a primal sense of great white shark-hunter machismo. They had reportedly received alligator tags, which are allocated to help balance a population that is spiraling out of control.

“I don’t ever feel good about killing an animal. But with that being said, I respect the harvest,” explained Grotz, adding that hunting gators also helps protect people from the “killing machines.”

He referenced the horrifying case of 2-year-old Lane Graves, who was killed by a gator in 2016 at a Disney World resort — not too far from where this latest specimen was caught.

Meanwhile, in June, a 13-year-old boy was grabbed by a gator while swimming with friends in Winter Springs, Florida.

Fortunately, the beast let go, allowing the youngster to escape from the potentially deadly attack with only a minor wound.

Unfortunately, the panhandle has seen a major spike in alligator attacks over the last decade.

Experts attribute the uptick to increased development in the region, which has brought people into closer contact with the reptiles.