A new fossil find suggests that the 200-million-year-old predatory marine reptile may have been larger than today’s blue whale, demonstrating that it evolved surprisingly quickly.
life
December 29, 2022
Artist’s impression of an ichthyosaur, Stenopterygius quadriscissus Dotted Zebra / Alamy stock photo
Prehistoric Earth was a place of monsters. There was a millipede with a length of 2.5 meters, a flying reptile with a wingspan of 11 meters, and a snake weighing more than a ton. But if that’s the biggest animal you’re looking for, conventional wisdom says you don’t need to go back in time. It is Over 500 million years of animal evolution, nothing else has matched it. Even the largest dinosaurs do.
Common sense may be wrong. The fossil record may hide animals larger than the blue whale. Over the decades, evidence has been accumulating that a truly gigantic super-predator swam in the oceans from 200 million to 250 million years ago. A series of discoveries and a reanalysis of previous discoveries now support this case dramatically.
Its impact is far-reaching. We don’t know exactly what this giant animal looked like, and we don’t even have a name for it. But we are beginning to figure out how such a gigantic creature was able to feed itself in the prehistoric oceans. , tells us that we may have grossly underestimated how big toothed carnivores can grow. The discovery that Leviathan has emerged suggests that we may need to rethink the factors that drive evolution on such a grand scale.
When dinosaurs ruled the land, several groups of marine reptiles ruled…
