Evidence of the world’s biggest sea monster found in the Alps

Scientists in the Swiss Alps may have found a damaged tooth from one of the biggest carnivorous sea monsters that ever swam the Earth’s waters.

One very special tooth might prove to belong to the biggest carnivorous sea monster that ever existed. Scientists think the tooth belongs to a perhaps unknown ichthyosaur (or ‘fish lizard’) weighing more than 100 tonnes, patrolling the darkest and deepest regions of the oceans some

205 million years ago. Even though significant parts of the tooth’s top have disappeared, scientists estimate that the root is twice as big as any other ichthyosaur tooth ever found.

The tooth ended up a long way from today’s oceans, having been excavated in the mountains of the Swiss Alps in 1990, and recently re-examined by scientists. The area in which the tooth was discovered is now at an altitude of 2800 metres above sea level, but more than 200 million years ago, it would have been covered by sea water.

The former tooth record-holder was an ichthyosaur that scientists estimated to be approximately 15 metres long – which could make the owner of the newly-discovered tooth one of the biggest animals that ever existed on either dry land or in water. The scientists do, however, stress that the damage to the tooth leaves several factors uncertain, so that there is the possibility that rather than a huge ichthyosaur, the fossil might belong to an ordinary ichthyosaur with unusually large teeth.

Giant ichthyosaurs evolved in the Triassic some 250-200 million years ago – shortly after the mass extinction event that had killed about 96% of life in the oceans. Marine reptiles apparently thrived in the volatile oceans thereafter, with explosive growth over the first five million years that left them as some of the biggest creatures, and at the very top of the food chain.

There seem to have been both tooted and toothless ichthyosaurs, with the largest toothed species so far discovered being the Himalayasurus, which was found in Tibet. But the scientists think the Swiss tooth is too big to fit any known species.

So far they have categorised the discovery as belonging to the genus shastasaurus. But if more fossils were found, scientists could be more certain in their belief that this is a newlydiscovered species that managed to outcompete all others for size.