Impression of Stenopterygius quadrissis, a type of ichthyosaur
Dotted Zebra / Alamy Stock Photo
Prehistoric Earth was home to monsters. They included a 2.5 meter long millipede, a flying reptile with an 11 meter wingspan, and a snake weighing more than a ton. But common sense says that if you're looking for the biggest animal of all time, there's no need to go back in time. Blue whales are known for reach 30 meters The length and weight reach 199 tons. In more than 500 million years of animal evolution, even the largest dinosaurs have no equal.
Conventional wisdom may be wrong. The fossil record may hide animals that were even larger than blue whales. For decades, evidence has trickled in that truly gigantic superpredators swam the oceans 200 million to 250 million years ago. Now, a series of discoveries and reanalyses of previous findings have dramatically supported this claim.
The impact is far-reaching. We don't know exactly what this giant animal looked like, and it doesn't even have a name. But we are beginning to understand how such gigantic creatures were able to feed themselves in prehistoric oceans. If confirmed to be larger than a blue whale, it would indicate that we may have significantly underestimated how large toothed carnivores can grow. More than that, the discovery that such a Leviathan emerged so soon after the most devastating mass extinction in Earth's history suggests that we may need to rethink the factors driving evolution on such a grand scale. ing.
When dinosaurs ruled the land, several groups of marine reptiles also ruled.
Source: www.newscientist.com
