New fossil discoveries present predatory marine reptiles from 200 million years in the past could have been larger than right this moment’s blue whales – and that they developed astonishingly quickly
Life
29 December 2022
Artist’s impression of Stenopterygius quadriscissus, an ichthyosaur dotted zebra / Alamy Inventory Picture
PREHISTORIC Earth was a spot of monsters. There have been 2.5-metre-long millipedes, flying reptiles with 11-metre wingspans and snakes that weighed over a tonne. But when it’s the greatest animal of all time you might be on the lookout for, typical knowledge says you don’t must step again in time. The blue whale is understood to reach 30 metres in size and to weigh 199 tonnes. Nothing else in additional than half a billion years of animal evolution comes shut, not even the most important dinosaur.
Typical knowledge may be improper. The fossil file could also be concealing an animal that was even larger than a blue whale. For many years there was a sluggish trickle of proof {that a} really monumental super-predator swam the seas between 200 and 250 million years in the past. Now, a string of discoveries and reanalysis of earlier findings has dramatically bolstered the case.
The implications are far-reaching. We don’t know precisely what this big animal appeared like and it doesn’t actually have a identify. We’ve got, nevertheless, begun to work out how such a big creature might feed itself within the prehistoric seas. Affirmation that it outgrew the blue whale would inform us that we could have drastically underestimated how massive toothed carnivores can develop. Greater than that, the invention that such leviathans appeared shortly after essentially the most devastating mass extinction in Earth’s historical past suggests we could must rethink the components that drive evolution on such an epic scale.
When dinosaurs dominated the land, a number of teams of marine reptiles dominated …
