A Sea Monster With a Human-Length Skull Discovered

The discovery of fossils belonging to the early dinosaur age still continues to amaze the scientific world, even though millions of years have passed. A new discovery has been made that fish-shaped marine reptiles that lived in the early dinosaur age ‘ichthyosaur’revealed that ichthyosaurs (ichthyosaurs) reached enormous sizes in a period of 2.5 million years, which, in evolutionary terms, is actually the way to reach these sizes. pretty short for a while.

Senior researcher Lars Schmitz, associate professor of biology at Scripps College, said of the discovery. “The world has come from a catastrophic extinction [Permiyen döneminin sonunda] “We discovered that at a time when ichthyosaurs were recovering, their size evolved much faster than whales.” using expressions, “It’s a beautiful beacon of hope and a sign of life’s resilience – if environmental conditions are right, evolution can happen very fast and life can come back.” he added.

“Imagine a sea dragon-like animal”

Researchers first discovered the ancient ichthyosaur’s fossils buried in the rocks of the Augusta Mountains in northwest Nevada in 1998. For this discovery, Schmitz “Only a few vertebrae were sticking out of the rock, but it was clear that the animal was large.” recorded as. However, it wasn’t until 2015 that the fossils, consisting of a skull, shoulder and fin-like appendage in good condition, were fully excavated and brought to the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History by helicopter for analysis.

As the research team reported online Thursday (December 23) in the journal Science, the new species Cymbospondylus youngorum was named. It is estimated that this large-jawed marine reptile, which has a rather strange appearance like other creatures of its time, lived during the Triassic period 247 million years ago. In addition, the researchers found that with a skull about 6.5 feet long (2 meters), this fully developed C. youngorum was over 55 feet (17 m) tall, or taller than a semi-trailer. Schmitz for Discovery, “Imagine a sea dragon-like animal: streamlined body, rather long limbs transformed into fins, and a long tail” used the phrases. During the lifetime of the 45-ton creature, a super-ocean off the west coast of North America Panthalassic OceanIt was noted that he may have lived in. Given its size and dentition, it is estimated that C. youngorum likely ate smaller ichthyosaurs, fish, and squid.

It’s true that there were many gigantic creatures that lived in the dinosaur age; however, C. youngorum stands out from the rest for several reasons. For example, C. youngorum lived just 5 million years after the “Great Dying,” a mass extinction event that occurred at the end of the Permian 252 million years ago and killed about 90 percent of the world’s species. According to a 2012 study in the journal Nature Geoscience, the fact that life on Earth took about 9 million years to recover after this extinction further increased the ichthyosaur’s enormous size. influential makes it.

New fossil documents rapid evolution of ichthyosaurs

However, there was also an explosion of diversification in marine mollusks known as ammonoids during the first 1 million to 3 million years of the mass extinction, according to a 2012 study. Researchers in the new study suggest that ichthyosaurs may have grown to such gigantic sizes, in part because eating jawless eel-like conodonts that filled the ecological void following the early Triassic ammonite eruption, as well as the mass extinction. great influence thinks it is. On the other hand, study co-author Eva Maria Griebeler, an evolutionary ecologist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz in Germany, said in a statement that whales grew up by eating highly productive primary producers such as plankton, and that they were found in dinosaur-age food webs. that there is no recorded.

According to the researchers, there are few differences between whales and ichthyosaurs, although there are different ways and timelines for reaching gigantism. similarity also available. For example, sperm whales dive to hunt giant squid and there is a link between large size and predatory hunting; There is also a link between large size and tooth loss, just as in toothless whales.

Schmitz, “This new fossil impressively documents the rapid evolution of gigantism in ichthyosaurs.” He pointed out that, in response to this, the whales followed a different path towards giantism and that this process was very longer and slower noted that. Paleontologists Lene Delsett and Nicholas Pyenson, who were not involved in the research, also contributed to the discovery. “Ichthyosaur history tells us that ocean giants were not guaranteed features of marine ecosystems, which meant that for all of us in the Anthropocene. valuable a lesson” used the phrases.