ANCIENT GIANTS OF THE DEEP!
Did the Blue Whale just lose its spot as the biggest animal of all time? Was there a 200 tonne superpredator that ate sharks for breakfast?
Examinations of a stored bone fragment mean that the blue whale is no longer the world's biggest animal. The fragment has proved to be from an extinct giant of 200 tonnes, prompting scientists to search drawers and cabinets to find disregarded evidence of huge ancient sea monsters.
One spring day in May 2016, amateur palaeontologist Paul de la Salle takes a walk on the beach near his house in Somerset, England. Suddenly, he spots a fossilised bone in the sand. He picks it up and brings it home to include it in his private fossil collection. One month later, he returns to the same spot on the beach, discovering four new bone fragments, and much to his amazement, the fossil hunter realizes that the five fossilized bone fragments make up one bone measuring about 1 m.
Later, when palaeontologists receive the Englishman’s finds, they are thrilled. The bone proves to have been located in the lower jar of an unknown member of the ichthyosaur fishlizard family that roamed the oceans more than 200 million years ago.
After comparing the bone fragments to previous bone finds of similar ichthyosaur species, the scientists conclude that the new fish lizard was bigger than a blue whale. With a length of up to 33 m and an average weight of some 150 t, the blue whale used to be the world’s biggest animal. According to the scientists, the newly-discovered fish lizard species was at least as big as the blue whale and probably out-competing it by several metres and tonnes.
Prehistoric lizards ruled the seas
More than 200 years before Paul de la Salle stumbled over the discovery of his life on a beach in Southern England, his fellow countryman Jospeh Anning excavated a 1.2-m-long skull of the then unknown fish lizard in the city of Dorset only 70 km away. The next year, his 12-year-old sister, Mary Anning, in 1812 found the rest of the skeleton. She later became one of England’s most famous palaeontologists.
The fish lizard has been scrutinized and analysed for more than two centuries, and the number of well-preserved bones from the awesome underwater predators has risen steadily over the years. Many of the fossils discovered are almost complete skeletons with well-preserved bones and distinct marks of soft parts such as skin and organs. Palaeontologists have even found fossils that reveal the stomach content of the fish lizards in the shape of fossilized fish and squid.
The numerous finds cover only a very brief period of the total of 160 million years, during which the fish lizards’ widely ramified biological order existed. And major parts of the prehistoric animals are still veiled in mystery. It remains unclear which specific prehistoric animal that originally got back into the ocean and hence became the common ancestor of the fish lizards. Likewise, the relationship between the different species remains unknown.
However, palaeontologists know for sure that fish lizards descended from reptiles and were hence closely related to the dinosaurs. Ichthyosaurs have been discovered in all sizes from less than 1 m to much longer than 20. Since the first evidence of prehistoric fish lizards saw the light of day in 1811, palaeontologists have excavated fossils from about 100 different fish lizard species. The fish lizards lived throughout most of the world and have apparently been at the top of the food chain, since they first appeared in the oceans about 250 million years ago in the Triassic. Ichthyosaurus means fish lizard in Latin, but whale lizard would have been more descriptive given the marine animals’ physical appearance. Anatomically speaking, the animals are more like modern dolphins than fish. Their jaws were often long and equipped with numerous pointed teeth – just like dolphins. Older fossil finds demonstrate that the fish lizards had lungs, so they had to go to the surface to breathe. Like other marine mammals, the fish lizards also gave birth to living offspring. Several fish lizards with embryos have been found, even a unique fossil of a mother and her baby, who both died for unknown reasons, as the female gave birth.
Even though the ichthyosaurs most of all looked like harmless dolphins, they had a killer instinct like that of the white shark.