The fossils of three ichthyosaurs — giant marine reptiles that patrolled primordial oceans — have been discovered high up in the Swiss Alps, and include the largest ever tooth found for the species, a study said yesterday.
With elongated bodies and small heads, the prehistoric leviathans weighed up to 80 tonnes and grew to 20m, making them among the largest animals to have ever lived.
They first appeared 250 million years ago in the early Triassic, and a smaller, dolphin-like subtype survived until 90 million years ago, but the gigantic ichthyosaurs, which comprised most of the species, died out 200 million years ago.
Photo: AFP /Laurent Garbay, University of Bonn / EurekAlert
Unlike dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs barely left a trace of fossil remains, and “why that is remains a great mystery to this day,” said Martin Sander of the University of Bonn, lead author of the paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The specimens in question, dated to 205 million years ago in the study, were unearthed between 1976 and 1990 during geological surveys, but were only recently analyzed in detail.
Fun fact: They were discovered at an altitude of 2,800m. During their lifetimes the three swam in waters around the supercontinent Pangea — but due to plate tectonics and the folding of the Alps, the fossils kept rising.
Photo: AFP / Rosi Roth, University of Zurich / EurekAlert
Ichthyosaurs were previously thought to have only inhabited the deep ocean, but the rocks from which the new fossils derive are believed to have been at the bottom of a shallow coastal area. It could be that some of the giants followed schools of fish there.
There are two sets of skeletal remains. One consists of ten rib fragments and a vertebra, suggesting an animal about 20m long, which is more or less equivalent to the largest ichthyosaur to have been found, in Canada.
The second animal measured 15m, according to an estimate from the seven vertebrae found.
“From our point of view, however, the tooth is particularly exciting,” Sander said. “Because this is huge by ichthyosaur standards: Its root was 60mm in diameter — the largest specimen still in a complete skull to date was 20mm and came from an ichthyosaur that was nearly 18m long.”
While this could indicate a beast of epic proportions, it is more likely to have come from an ichthyosaur with particularly gigantic teeth, rather than a particularly gigantic ichthyosaur.
Research holds that extreme gigantism is incompatible with a predatory lifestyle requiring teeth.
That is why the largest known animal to have ever lived — the blue whale at 30m long and 150 tonnes — lacks teeth. Blue whales are filter feeders, while the much smaller sperm whales, at 20m long and 50 tonnes, are hunters, and use more of their energy to fuel their muscles.
“Marine predators therefore probably can’t get much bigger than a sperm whale,” Sander said, although more fossils would need to be found to know for certain.
“Maybe there are more remains of the giant sea creatures hidden beneath the glaciers,” he said.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS